PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns are often an essential source of traffic and revenue for many businesses, so making sure you’re investing your budget wisely is essential. PPC can get expensive and, depending on your industry, ridiculously competitive, so keeping tabs on your campaigns’ performance is a must, but how do you know if you have enough data to assess your PPC campaigns?
Checking in on your reports should be a regular exercise, to monitor any changes in performance, tweak your settings, bids, keywords, etc and generally be aware of where your campaign is at at any given time. But checking too often can mean you’re focusing on a smaller dataset and not seeing the bigger picture.
Daily figures
We once worked alongside a large ecommerce business, attracting hundreds of thousands of visits to their website each month from Google Ads. Their in-house team checked their reports daily to see what revenue Google Ads had generated for their business the previous day. But then problems started to arise when they were switching ads on and off, removing keywords and changing bids based on 24 hours’ worth of data.
A lot can happen that can influence the data in your reports in such a short timeframe. Each day of the week can affect traffic and search intent. You can’t compare a Thursday with a Sunday, for example. Just take a look at your Analytics reports over a month and see the weekly pattern of your visits. If Saturday is the quietest day on your website, you definitely don’t want to judge the success of your Google Ads based on what happened on one Saturday alone.
If you only generate a modest amount of traffic to your website from PPC, there simply won’t be enough data to draw any conclusions, so aim for at least 3 figures in terms of number of clicks.
Weekly figures
A week’s worth of data is going to give you more insight and average out the traffic over the 7 days. Comparing one week to the next is often a better option here. But don’t forget, no two weeks are the same, so bear in mind the things that can affect traffic on a weekly basis such as school holidays, festivals, even the weather!
During 2020 and 2021 we’ve seen a single government announcement have a massive impact on traffic in some sectors. Along with the tightening and easing of public freedoms and work from home advice. No two weeks have been the same!
Monthly figures
Taking a month’s snapshot of data gives us an average of 4 weeks to really see whether a trend is indeed a trend or just a blip due to external factors.
The danger then is comparing the current month with the previous when we have seasonality to take into consideration. We haven’t come across a business yet that doesn’t experience some degree of seasonality in their data. Even if it’s just a quiet two weeks over Christmas. Most businesses have a clear seasonality pattern when they know they have busy periods and quiet times.
To rule out any seasonality in your reports, it’s wise to look back at the same period in the previous year. Comparing June this year to June last year, for example, would be better than comparing June this year with May, as there’s 2 Bank Holidays and a school holiday in May, but none in June, so this could affect your traffic.
Our advice
Whilst it’s great to look at your daily or weekly performance on Google Ads, we wouldn’t recommend basing big decisions from small datasets.
Instead, if you think you see a trend, confirm this by looking back further at historical data. Can you spot the same trend in previous weeks, months or years? Thus confirming it could be seasonality. Ask yourself, has there been anything different about this period? What external factors might have influenced our traffic in this timeframe?
This becomes more important when your numbers are low. You may need to look at your data in terms of quarter and annual reports to really see what’s happening and be able to act on the data and get meaningful results from your changes.
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