On the Adpulse Dashboard is a Scatter Plot chart labeled Budget Performance. This 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 Budget 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.
Filter options:
Budget type:
Account Budgets
Child Budgets
Time period:
Current period - where the period is defined by the schedule of the budget
Last 7 days
Last 14 days
Last 28 days
How to work with the Quadrants
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 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.
Some suggestion actions:
Ask the client for more budget
Decrease bids
Decrease budget
Turn off poor performers
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.
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
Orange (bottom left quadrant)
The optimization zone – your performance isn’t great (gulp) but at least you’re not throwing good money after bad.
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)
Your performance is great but you’re just not spending enough of the budget. Pretty easy to fix.
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?