Google Data Studio Perfected for KPI Reporting

Google Data Studio KPI dashboards help clients view multiple reports and a wide range of data in one location. They allow for true visibility into account and campaign performance and show how the SalesX® account optimizations are performing. These reports capture near real time data that is refreshed hourly from Google Ads, Bing, Google Analytics and custom scripts.

The reports start with high level KPI data - total spend, KPI goals and the changes that have occurred in the account. This gives clients a quick look into the progress and success of the account. The first page also includes allocation and recent projects that the SalesX® team has worked on. Below the fold, the page shows recording breaking dates for CTR, conversions and CPA / ROAS. Finally, the report’s first page shows possible errors, which are monitored by scripts, with SalesX® often notified before Google or the client is notified.

The second page includes Google Ads performance, high level data on the top campaigns and device breakdown. Clients can review impressions, clicks, CTR, conversions and CPC. Specific campaigns can be selected and the date range can be modified to show specific time frames, allowing clients to see campaign trends.

Since customer interactions are insightful and vital to understanding our client’s needs, the third page of this report shows Google Analytics data - users, sessions, page views, locations and the media driving traffic. This allows clients the ability to review Google Ads and GA data in the same report.

Pages four and five are labeled ORCA and they provide additional insight into some of the areas where we optimize the account. These pages show information on the day of the week, time of day, device, gender, etc. This helps us illustrate how the performance of the account can be adjusted with bid modifications that help the account perform.

Our Alpha/Beta process, X-Alphas®, is one of the key factors that contribute to our client’s success and the difference in these campaigns can be seen on page five. Comparing the key indicators in the campaigns help show the success of the Alpha campaigns. The Alpha campaigns have increased CTR, conversions, conversion rates, higher ROAS,  lower CPA and better avgerage CPCs.

The final page of our report shows Google’s Auction Insights from the client account. The auction insights report allows a comparison of their performance with other advertisers who are participating in the same auctions that they are in. This information can help determine bids and budgets along with potential missed opportunities in that account. The auction insights report shows impression share, overlap rate, position above rate, top of page rate, and outranking share.

At SalesX® each client receives its own custom Google Data Studio report that is curated to fit their needs. These reports can also show custom Google Analytics data as well as data from other platforms such as Bing and Facebook.

Is Your Digital Marketing Agency Making You A Hero?

Key Points: Your campaign’s performance analysis must align with your company’s standards for measuring metrics. To achieve such alignment, your agency requires three specific masteries, as described in this article.

Cultivating Digital Marketing Agency Best Practices

It’s Friday afternoon. You and your colleagues are gathered in the boardroom. Your latest digital ad campaign has far exceeded expectations. Consequently, you’ve received a raise, and your fellow execs are relishing the accolades they’ve been showered with. Pop open the champagne!

A dream scenario? Actually, it can be your reality -- provided the following factors are in place:

• Your agency is finding and maximizing new channels of advertising that systematically impact key business value areas of your enterprise.

• Advertising successes are aligned to how your company measures its metrics, thus keeping you on top of your campaign’s performance.

Alignment Generates Transparency — and Increased Accountability

Performance and metrics alignment results in transparency and greater accountability: The digital advertising is on the hook to perform, while your company must maximize the results of that performance by having internal processes ready to receive and interpret the data from that digital effort.

What Alignment Looks Like

Let’s say your company is a services company with 200 locations. You measure success for each individual location by assessing new client acquisition growth weekly, year over year.

Your analysis might address new client acquisition results on week 17 of 2018 vs. week 17 of 2019. Was there growth? If there was, what was the percentage of growth for each branch of your 200-branch services company? Comparing last week’s results with your year-to-date results, are you on track to meet your annual number -- and to distribute bonuses to stakeholders in your company?

If that is how success is being measured inside your company, then your digital advertising should be measured the same way. The tools and methods to achieve this are readily available. The onus then is on your agency to have the skills to provide you with the data the way that you want to receive it.

Simply put, your agency must respond to your needs in the specific ways you’ve communicated to them.

23,000 Options For Achieving Campaign Success

How can your agency best meet your needs? Well, therein lies the beauty of digital advertising. For example, Google Ads alone has 47+ different features that can be leveraged in accordance to needs.

Further, there are at least 26 common areas that require monitoring and adjustments on a routine basis to ensure your campaign is up and running with optimal effectiveness (these were previously published in the SalesX ORCA Checklist).

There are also 19 different business performance value areas (a.k.a. Business Value Dials as identified by Intel Corp) that you can measure internally. Some examples of these are the obvious Direct Income, and the less obvious opportunities for Cross Selling, Upselling, Opening New Markets, reducing your Time To Market, Maximizing Existing Markets, Increasing Inventory Turnover, Reducing Returns, etc.

Thus, when you multiply those elements together, you have over 23,000 options (47x26x19=23,218) for making your campaigns run in the most effective way. Your agency’s responsibility is to find the right combination.

Three Requisite Agency Masteries

Technical Mastery

From a technical perspective, a proven way to gain mastery is to continuously test, have the ability to analyze results and to execute changes based on the findings of those tests, en masse. While it is easy to claim continuous testing, the key is to routinely and rapidly analyze the results and to execute action based on those results. Granted, that is easier said than done, unless your agency has expert PPC obsessors whose DNA includes the continuous testing and execution cycle.

Business Implications Mastery

For the business side, the next step is to tie results back to business value. That’s where the executives of your agency must have veteran-level business experience that enables them to educate you about the nuances of digital advertising -- and to collaborate with you so that measurable business value relates back to campaign results.

For example, a company with 50 branches decided to discontinue their ineffective TV advertising in favor of doing digital ads. The goal was to capture prospects who were likely to tour their locations and sign up. Surprisingly, they soon discovered that despite the increased prospect sign-ups, the ratio of no-shows for the tour had actually spiked, thus giving the impression that the digital ad sign-ups were less effective that the ones acquired through the TV ads.

However, upon further exploration, we found out that the company’s internal processes did not include reminder emails, calls or text messages. Subsequently, we coached the company about the nature of digital leads and the necessity to employ follow-up emails and texts right up to the tour date/hour.

With the above corrections in place, the issue was resolved and the increased leads were accompanied with a corresponding increase in the tour and sign-up numbers. This was a matter of helping the company understand the nature of digital leads, and to provide them with guidance about using best practices to adjust for those nuances in order to maximize results.

Transparent Reporting Mastery

As to reporting and transparency, your agency should be showing you the results that are being achieved and the level of effort that is being applied. For instance, an e-commerce company might have 150 different categories and hundreds of thousands of keywords they are targeting. Their agency should, in real time, provide the following current and historical data:

• The status of all primary and secondary KPIs

• Recent projects and time allocations with the ongoing work that is being done for them

• Spend allocation by channel

• Record breaking dates and trends

• Possible account errors and flags

• Click through rates, impressions, conversions and value, costs, top campaigns and device breakdowns

• Sessions trends and top performing geo locations and hours

• Channels driving unique purchases

Maximizing Value From Your Digital Advertising

Digital advertising can -- and should -- be leveraged to impact the entire length and breadth of your opportunity funnel. However, your agency needs astute technical chops, real life business experience, and the ability to program for innovative data measurement that matches your business needs. If they have those three foundational elements -- and can quickly identify and remedy any gaps in your business processes to ensure seamless matching to your digital opportunities -- extraordinary results will be inevitable. This positive result is captured in the The Upward Funnel of Business Value Maximization illustrated below:

X-Octane® - Custom Google Ads Script by SalesX®

Agency benefits + In-house level attention: How to get the best of both worlds when setting strategy and overseeing performance for ads

Companies hire agencies to manage their Google Ads campaigns because they want and need the skills, experience, systems, and tools that agencies have to offer. Other companies have in-house account managers because they want someone to watch their account closely throughout the day, every day.

While working with an agency has its distinct and irrefutable benefits, it can also take some getting used to because while an agency brings a lot more resources to the table, the allocation of those resources to any given account can be far less than having a full time person on staff for each type of task. This has been an age old problem, until now.

Difficulty in Continuously Monitoring Performance in Ads

Traditionally agency account managers monitor the performance of their accounts and as long as KPIs are being met they keep their focus on new and upcoming projects. When something looks off or an account is having a particularly challenging day they might look into making changes to it or to give it another day and see if it’s a fluke that will right itself.

The other thing that happens is that account managers check Analytics for spikes or dips in performance then go back and try to figure out what might have caused those spikes or dips. Yet invariably this will be after the fact and too late to do anything about it in a proactive manner.

These types of behaviors are typical because Google Ads is an auction environment with changing conditions and it’s unwise to jump to conclusions based on any given day’s data. Yet this is also the reason as to why extraordinary days aren’t being modeled immediately and why awful days aren’t being stymied instantly. This is also why while the KPI of an account might look fine today, in a few days it might suddenly tank because of various factors that cause lag in seeing the results in Google Ads.

Leveraging Google Ads hourly data for quick wins and fast stop losses

One way we’ve solved this problem at SalesX® is via a custom Google Ads script we call X-Octane®. Using X-Octane® we check each of our account’s performances automatically every hour, compare it to several other performance metrics, and flag whether the account is over performing, underperforming, or is running on par with expectations. We are able to tell how the account is doing compared to the last 7 days, compared to the last 14 days, whether the account is meeting or exceeding KPIs and by what percentage, and how the account is running based on the expected pace for the month, i.e., how much room do we have to accelerate based on the current positive conditions.

X-Octane® allows us to monitor every one of our accounts under management every hour and see actionable trends that lead to micro wins or micro stop-losses. These micro-trends then compound for macro wins at the end of the month and/or setback averted.

In the above example, an actual SalesX® account, on the surface looked like it was doing great, however X-Octane® noticed that while the past 14 days performance was above KPI (108%), the account had been trending downwards and the last 7 days performance was actually lowering the account performance down to 74% of KPI goal for that week. This real time information allowed us to make some adjustments to the account and monitor their impact via X-Octane® seeing that the performance for the day was registering at 118% of KPI, reversing the downward trend, and keeping the overall KPI at 107%.

Google Ads Performance via full time attention plus agency expertise

X-Octane® is an example of how smart Google Ads scripts automation combinations can yield an optimal performance environment in day-to-day monitoring and management of Google Ads accounts. While this is just a single example of such scripts usage as one would find in the X-Vault® it demonstrates that even this sole functionality bridges a gap that has previously eluded most advertisers and agencies. I.e., it has enabled the ability to monitor, compare, flag, and adjust account performance every hour, on every account, every day.