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The Adpulse Dashboard Explained
The Adpulse Dashboard Explained
Updated over 2 months ago

Everything you need to know about what’s happening in your accounts, all summarized in one place

Introduction

Managing multiple PPC accounts is complex at the best of times, so knowing which accounts need your attention at a glance is vital in order to stay on top of issues and prevent anything from falling through the cracks.

The Adpulse dashboard does exactly this for you - it’s your daily go-to summary that clearly details what’s happening across your client accounts so you can easily identify which accounts need attention.

Pro Tip: Use Tags to segment the data on the Dashboard into specific portfolios of clients. Examples are; by user, by team, by vertical, clients at risk, or Tier 1 clients - lots of options to get a unique insight into your client's performance instantly


What The Dashboard Tells You

Insight Scorecards

Adpulse runs a range of regular scans across your accounts automatically, and the results are summarized into clickable scorecards so you can quickly see what’s important.

  • Critical - shows the number of critical issues found (eg 404 errors on landing pages, failed credit card payments etc)

  • Important - similar to above, but - funnily enough - not so Critical.

  • Opportunities - the number of opportunities found that can help to improve performance

  • Best Practice - Tasks that are best practice

  • Wasted Spend - Tasks focussed on underperforming areas in the last 30 days


Budget Performance

This scatter plot chart plots the Budget Pacing and KPI performance of your Adpulse Budgets, which then fall into quadrants:

  • Blue (top right quadrant) - Overpacing and overperforming

  • Red (bottom right quadrant) - Overpacing and underperforming

  • Orange (bottom left quadrant) - Underpacing and underperforming

  • Yellow (top left quadrant) - Underpacing and overperforming

We have also added a 5th section:

  • Green (top center) - Budget pacing is on target and KPI performance is greater than 100%. This is where you want all your budgets to be.

Check out our White Paper 'Quadrant PPC Management - A Framework for Agencies to Scale PPC Management' to get a deeper insight into how you can leverage the Quadrant concepts to; Work smarter by spending your time on actions that improve performance, Standardize processes - great for remote teams, Actions that actually improve performance

Timelapse showing the impact of AutoPacing on a large number of Ad Accounts

If you have nominated an account-level KPI and budget in your Budgets/KPI page, the account will appear in the chart as a bubble (updated hourly). The Account Performance scatter graph combines these two most important metrics to give you a visual way to easily check for anomalies and underperformance.

The size of the bubble represents the size of the budget, and the color and location on the chart represent the problem or opportunity for that account, based on its budget pacing and actual performance vs target.

If your account budgets are pacing nicely and you are on target to meet or exceed your performance goals, you are well-positioned for a great month! You can see these accounts clustered around the middle of the graph.

Green (top center)

The “Goldilocks zone” – where both account performance and budget pacing are just like baby bear’s porridge – not too much, not too little, but juuuust right 👱‍♀️. You’re meeting or exceeding your performance goals and spending very close to your budget target.

In a perfect world, all your clients would be here of course, but we all know that this is not going to be the reality.

We’ve listed the other zones below, in order of recommended priority, and we suggest checking the scatter plot for each one to two weeks (depending on how busy you are) so you can rank your accounts and action accordingly.

Blue (top right quadrant)

The opportunity zone – this is the easiest zone to pull back to green as your performance is great but you are spending too quickly. You either need to reduce spending or get more budget from your client.

Red (bottom right quadrant)

Your account is spending too quickly and performance is poor – these accounts are often the ones you need to spend time on most urgently, as this is where most clients churn.

Orange (bottom left quadrant)

The optimization zone – your performance isn’t great (gulp) but at least you’re not throwing good money after bad.

Yellow (top left quadrant)

Your performance is great but you’re just not spending enough of the budget. Pretty easy to fix.


Performance Priorities

Our Performance Dashboards automatically organize your data into useful categories. Dive into levers such as Keywords, Campaigns, Devices, Search Terms, Asset Groups, and Products and quickly prioritize what needs your attention first.

Click on the numbers to view the results for each Performance section.

Take action in-app, with each Performance Dashboard having distinct Actions: add negatives, update bid strategies and bid modifiers, pause keywords, and add keywords - all individually or in bulk. With more actions coming.

No need to flick between platforms or spend endless hours in spreadsheets - use your time to actually improve the performance of your campaigns.


Budget Pacing & KPI Performance

The fastest way to understand how your account portfolio is pacing or tracking against KPIs.

Budget Pacing

Under lots

<=80

Red

under little

>80 & <=90

Yellow

On

>90 & <110

Green

Over little

>=110 & <120

Yellow

Over lots

>=120

Red

KPI Performance

Under

<=90

Red

#bb4646

On

>90 & <110

Green Light

#4bac91

Over

>=110

Green Dark

#277962


Pro tips

  • Use tags to group accounts, then filter results to view only those accounts. A great use case here is to tag accounts with team names - selecting your team shows the results just for accounts in your team.

  • All the graphs and tables on the dashboard contain clickable elements, which means you can click through to investigate or action the item you are interested in. Try it!

  • Hover over graph elements for more information on that item

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