How do you assess your Google Ads season campaign performance? Over the past year, we have shared lots of content about how best to optimise your paid ads, considering many things from your budget, your capacity and your messaging.
We suggest you regularly access your Google Ads campaign performance throughout the duration of the campaign. Sometimes small tweaks can make a huge difference.
It’s also absolutely essential to evaluate your Google Ads campaign performance when the campaign is complete. So…now that the festive period is over, it’s time to check if there are any opportunities to improve your holiday season campaign for next time. It’s best to do this as soon as you can. Don’t wait until you’re ready to launch the next campaign before you do this!
Ready for our 5 top tips for evaluating your Google Ad campaign performance after the holiday season? Watch our video!
Evaluate, reflect and learn from your numbers.
First of all, evaluate, reflect and learn from your numbers. Analyse the outcome of your campaign!
Did you manage to meet your desired goals? Compare your campaign metrics to what you originally forecasted.
If you have done this campaign (or similar) before, then compare it to your previous results too. Metrics to look out for are impressions, clicks, conversions and profit.
Understand your visibility in the market
Secondly, understand your visibility in the market.
Look at your impression share to understand how many people are actually potentially interested in your product or service. If you’ve never heard of impression share before, it’s simply the percentage of impressions that your ads have actually received compared to the total number of impressions that your ads could get.
By working out this percentage you will be able to understand the demand you’ve captured for your product or service. In other words, did you have enough chances (or impression share) to reach the majority of people willing to buy your product or service in this period of time?
Another thing to consider is your lost impression share. Is this too high? Your lost impression share is the percentage of impression share that you’ve lost out of the total eligible impressions.
Look into this data more closely. For example, were there times you had to lower your bids (and therefore lose visibility) because of a limited budget?
Run a quick competitor analysis
Thirdly, run a quick competitor analysis. Use ‘auction insights’ to compare performance against other advertisers that are participating in the same auctions that you are.
Look at metrics like impression share, click-through rate and conversion rates to see if your campaign has been aggressive and powerful enough.
Find ways to improve your bid optimisation
Step 4 is to find ways to improve your bid optimisation.
Did you manage to capitalise on popular products or services or pull back on products/services that didn’t drive sales?
Use in-platform ‘bid simulators’ to see how you could have performed if you had increased your bids for certain products, services or keywords. If you didn’t use an automated bid strategy, consider testing one ahead of the next holiday season to make the most of profitable opportunities.
Compare performance with other channels
Last but not least, compare performance with other channels. Can you spot similar trends? Are there major differences between channels? These insights are extremely important to evaluate and improve your budget allocation for next time.
For example, if you had great results from Google ads and email marketing, perhaps you should consider allocating a bigger part of your budget towards these two channels next time. Learn everything about planning and running cross-channel campaigns in our blog post ‘Essential elements for a successful cross-channel campaign‘.
Additional, important notes!
There you go! These are 5 key areas to consider when analysing your holiday season campaigns on Google.
Please remember that we’ve created these tips especially for your holiday season ads, so they might not be suitable for all campaigns due to many factors like seasonal competition, budget and timeline.
When reviewing your holiday Google Ads campaign performance, it’s essential that you read, review and assess your numbers as soon as you can so that you understand what worked well and what can be improved for your next campaign.
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