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.
What The Dashboard Tells You
Scan Scorecards
Adpulse runs a plethora of regular scans across your accounts, 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 - a summary of how much money has been spent on underperforming areas in the last 30 days
Account 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 represents 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 right quadrant)
These accounts are overspending, but their performance is above target. What a great opportunity to call your client and brag, but also ask for more budget! If no more budget is available, you can always trim off the lower performing parts of the campaigns to increase performance even more. Either way, you’re a rockstar in your client’s eyes!
Red (bottom right quadrant)
Not surprisingly, the opposite of your green accounts. These ones are your troublemakers. We liken them to a sultry teenager - they are costing you a lot of money and performing very poorly!
We would suggest you reduce the spend on these accounts immediately, then look for ways to improve performance before ramping up the spend again.
Some suggested actions:
Check for wasted spend (adgroups, keywords, search terms, n-grams, audiences, devices, locations & demographics
Check conversion tracking - set up correctly?
Bid strategy appropriate? Time for experiments? Recent changes?
Check keyword relevance
Check landing pages for relevance and page speed (https://pagespeed.web.dev/)
Best performers being limited (budget/bids)?
Campaign types appropriate? What can be trimmed?
Network performance (Search/Shopping/Display/Partners)
Geotargeting tight enough?
Are any ad groups, keywords or urls spending a high portion of budget or CPC increased? Low performing ads?
Conversion rate changed?
Check for high CPC search terms
Check for changes in average order value
Check for products that normally perform but are out of stock
Blue (bottom left quadrant)
These accounts are still performing poorly compared to target, but they are not spending as much of their budget as you had allocated (ie. they are underpacing). This is a great opportunity to focus on driving up performance, and once you’ve solved the lack of performance puzzle, increase spend carefully.
Some suggested actions to improve performance:
Check conversion tracking - set up correctly?
Check geotargeting is correct
Bid strategy appropriate & bids set?
Campaign type and network appropriate?
Check policy manager for issues
Payment or feed issues?
Ads & keywords all approved & no 404’s?
Should the unspent budget be allocated to a different platform?
Brand campaign set up & getting impression share?
Best performing campaigns limited by budget/bids?
Check for negative blocks (on both keywords and search terms with good history)
Yellow (top left quadrant)
These accounts are performing nicely against their goals but are just not spending their budget, so they represent a great opportunity to increase spending and generate more leads/sales at or above the target performance levels.
Some suggested actions to expand reach:
Use duplicated campaigns with different bid strategies (we call this ‘Parallel Campaign Strategy”)
Add remarketing
Expand geotargeting
Low volume url’s/products that could be split out
Best performing campaigns being limited (budget/bids)?
Add broad match keywords selectively
New campaign types (PMax, pay for conversion display etc)
Increase bid modifiers on good performers
Check for negative blocks (on both keywords and search terms with good history)
Check ads for policy issues
Check seasonality - is spend drop expected?
Optimization Priorities
Our Optimization Dashboards automatically organize your data into useful categories. Dive into Keywords, Campaigns, Devices, Search Terms, Asset Groups, and Products and quickly prioritize what needs your attention first.
Take action in-app, with each 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
Green = between 90% and 110% (looking good!)
Yellow = between 80% and 90%, or between 110% and 120% (might need attention?)
Red = less than 80% or greater than 120% (danger!)
KPI Performance
Dark Green = >110% of target (fantastic work - take the day off!)
Light Green = between 90% and 110% of target (right on track)
Red = less than 90% of target (underperforming - needs your attention?)
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