Are You Taking Full Advantage of the Dimensions Tab?

When it comes to PPC advertising, sometimes it seems like there are more questions than answers.

For example, say your conversions recently doubled. That’s a good thing, but the question is, why did your conversions increase so much?

At first, you might be inclined to think, “Who cares? My conversions doubled overnight! Why does it matter how they increased. I’m just happy that they increased.”

However, that’s a terrible answer.

What if you are getting a lot more conversions because your conversion tracking is set up wrong? What if you just inadvertently discovered a secret about your audience that you can use to improve your account performance? What if you could use this increase in conversions to help your other marketing channels produce more conversions?

If you don’t know why your account is performing a certain way, you’ll never be able to get it to perform better. And, if you’re happy with your current results, wouldn’t you be happier with even better results?

Now, I’ll admit that sometimes it can be hard to figure out why certain PPC metrics are the way they are, but before you start to spout off nonsense like, “results can vary greatly and may fluctuate daily based on the day of the week, time of the day, the weather, the color of jeans hipsters are wearing, or the percentage of those who tie their shoes vs. those who wear slip-ons” let’s see if we can figure out what’s really going on.

Honestly, is your conversion rate better because maroon jeans are in vogue for hipsters? Probably not.

So, what’s really going on? To get at the heart of your PPC metrics, let’s take a look at your Dimensions tab.

In the Dimensions tab, drop down the “top movers” category:

Here you can find valuable information that speaks to the increases and decreases of particular campaigns. Depending on the dates you are looking at, and the available data, you can find top movers (increases/decreases) for metrics including cost, clicks, conversions, etc. To identify the top movers, you can compare data in 7, 14, and 28-day periods. In the example below, I am comparing a 14-day period ending on Nov 24. (Ie. Nov 11 – Nov 24 compared to Oct 28 – Nov 10)

In that time period comparison, we can see that Conversions increased by +43.70%.

Obviously, it was most likely due to the Halloween season being over and kids getting sick, locking themselves in the bathroom, which allowed their parents to spend more time shopping for this product or service.

Let’s pretend that explanation never happened.

Underneath the high-level overview, you’ll find campaign and ad group specifics.

Here we see the top movers for these particular (hidden) campaigns and ad groups.

It’s clear that there was a large increase in one specific campaign and ad group. Impressions increased, clicks increased, my CPC decreased, Avg. Pos. remained the same, and my conversions increased by 73.91%.

Was it just a good 14 days? Was it the Halloween candy thing? umm cough cough… that didn’t happen… so it must have been the maroon pants that hipster was wearing like I had guessed.

We’re getting closer to finding the real “culprit.”

When you click on the “view change history” link, it will take you to the change history and show you all the changes you made within your specified time period. These are all changes that could have influenced my Conversions to increase by 73.91%, with the obvious answer highlighted in green:

Okay, so it’s not exactly that easy, but by looking at the changes in your change history that match up with the improvements in your Dimensions Tab, you can often quickly identify what caused the changes to your PPC metrics.

Conclusion

Using your Dimensions Tab is a great way to figure out the why behind your campaign metrics.

While it’s possible that there’s some insane explanation for changes in your account, the odds are that with the Dimensions Tab and a little time and research, you’ll be able to figure out how to resolve any problems and reproduce your successes.

At the end of the day, while hipsters might look great in a pair of maroon jeans, it has no real influence on the success of your business.