Creative Marketing | 25/06/2017

Take your (PPC) brain to another dimension

Posted by Christian Ryan

You wouldn’t often associate the practice of PPC with the lyrical musings of Keith Flint from The Prodigy, and in most cases you’d be right not to. However, there is one very small instance in which we can… Dimensions.

For those that don’t know, dimensions are a tab of Google Adwords, which allows advertisers the ability to look at all manner of customer insight, from location, to day of the week, to actual search terms to phone call details. Dimensions are one of my favourite areas of Google Adwords. Whilst they’ve been around some time, my feeling is that they can often be underused as an area of insight and optimisation. By studying the minute detail, you can build up a specific idea of how those that click are engaging and ultimately converting on your website.

I’ve listed below my top 3 tips that can take your PPC campaigns to another dimension … (So pay close attention.)

  • Locations

Filtering the location dimension within Adwords can give some great insight into where some of the most engaged users are navigating your site. Whether it’s CTR or conversions which are governing the optimisations of your campaigns, the ability to see where converting users are clicking from can really help you refine the locations you’re targeting and ensure you’re being as efficient as possible with spend.

Drill down into country, county, city, or even postcode, and determine where your most profitable or least profitable visitors are coming from and then feed this information into your campaign’s geographic settings. Once these have been applied you can increase or decrease bids in accordance with your findings. Bish bash bosh.

  • Paid and Organic

If you’re a seasoned PPC pro, you might have come across the term cannibalisation. This isn’t a reference to Hannibal Lector, but actually a brand’s organic visibility for certain keywords being eaten into by the same brand’s paid presence. Often this is seen as a little silly – why would you pay for a click when you can have it free? This is a very good question, and there are lots of different answers dependent on the situation. Dimensions can help shed light on this question also: by looking at this report, you can see how much cannibalisation is occurring and whether you need to readdress the balance of expenditure. The report will highlight “ad shown only”, “organic shown only”, or “both shown” – take a look at the keywords that have visibility for both; you may be able to save some of that all-important monthly budget.

  • Labels

When labels were first announced back in 2012, PPC experts rejoiced. No longer was there a need to mine data or use excel to filter for keywords, ads, or campaigns. The Dimension tab allows you to look at each type of label, but also makes it super simple to analyse the information you’re seeing with specific KPIs. You can then use this data to decide whether this specific campaign or promo has been successful and then replicate it or put a halt on the messaging. With the ever-increasing networks and advertising methods at a PPC’s disposal, this time saver can be gold dust.

So there were three of my favourite dimensions that we often use as an agency to optimise our clients’ accounts. Whilst they’re not new or ground-breaking, they can help drive efficiencies within a short space of time, giving you more time to focus on some other key areas.