In the age of digital, the amount of data gathered through PPC can be overwhelming. The data contains clues to who your customers are. How old are they? Where were they when they were searching? What device did they use? Are they really searching for you or something else?

Finding the answers to these questions and meshing all data gathered from PPC together is quickly becoming more accessible due to the development of many useful tools. Below are five tools PPC marketers should be using to get the most out of their data.

  1.   Live Data Feeds

In PPC, numbers are changing every second of the day. Using anything other than a live data feed will set your analysis efforts up for failure. Rather than downloading and importing fresh data into excel or a Google sheet daily, get a live data feed that automatically updates as often as you tell the software.

As Google Ads has allowed for campaigns to spend up to three times the daily budget, controlling the spend of campaigns is more challenging. By using a live data feed, PPC marketers can easily observe how much an account has spent in real time and make any adjustments as needed.

  1.   Call Tracking

Google Ads lets you see the number of calls in the conversion column. But how do you know if those calls are qualified leads or people accidently clicking on your ad, hoping to get ahold of the other guys across the street?

Call tracking software allows you to listen to the recorded calls to analyze lead quality. Call tracking software is able to record to lead source to the granular keyword level which allows marketers to make necessary changes to get their ads in front of the right person. It  also allows us to use dynamic number insertion and change the number that appears on the landing page depending on the source the click came from. For example, someone that came from a Facebook ad will see a different number than someone who came from a Bing ad.

  1.   Landing Page Platform

Much like call tracking, Google will record the number of form fills, but how do you know if those leads are qualified? Using a landing page platform to create landing pages only accessible via your ads allows you to more accurately track conversions.

Making changes to a site can occasionally cause Google’s tracking code to break and not accurately track the number of conversions your paid search efforts are bringing you. We use a landing page platform to accurately track the number of conversions from our paid search campaigns and asses lead quality. Make sure to let your agency know when changes are made to your site so adjustments can be made as necessary.

  1.   Excel

Going back to the basics of formulas and pivot tables is where your data is going to reveal its secrets. For example, perhaps one ad was the best performing until you broke out all the parts of that ad into a pivot table and learned that your first headline was carrying the weight and other ads with the same description were not performing. Change out the description and watch conversion rates fly up and to the right.

Staying up to date with your Excel skills helps optimize campaigns, ad groups and ads alike. Excel or Google sheets can integrate with live data feeds, allowing you to perform formulas and build Pivot tables using the most up to date data. Pivot tables condense large amounts of data into a table that is easier to understand and gather insights from.

  1.   Visualization software

While Excel tells you everything you need to know, integrating with more visual charts, maps, or graphs help marketers quickly know what is performing and what isn’t. After all, the first thing on the overview page of the Google Ads interface is a large line graph.

We use Google Data Studio as it has many data visualization options. Remember those questions we were asking earlier? In Data Studio you can make a bar graph of conversions by age, segment clicks by device type, or even create a location heat map for conversions across targeted locations.

Are you using all of these tools to get the most out of the piles of data generated from your PPC campaigns? Clicks and Clients can help you sort through all this data and build the most optimized campaigns. In the age of data and digital, are you really listening to what your data is telling you and turning those answers into insights or throwing it away and trying again?