Pay Per Click Charts

How Does Pay-per-Click Work?

To answer what is PPC, it’s critical to understand how this advertising model works.

Services like Amazon Advertising or Google Ads allow marketers to bid on keywords relevant to their businesses and offerings. When people search these keywords on the respective platform, your paid ad messages may appear.

For example, if you bid on the keyword “coffee maker” on Google Ads, people making searches related to coffee makers may see your ad link at the top of their search results.

This works the same on Amazon Advertising. When someone searches “coffee maker,” your products may appear at the top of the search results.

How much you bid on a particular keyword determines how much you pay for each click. If your ad content appears on a search results page and no one clicks, you are not charged anything.

Your bid value also determines when and if your ads appear. A higher bid increases the likelihood of people seeing your paid messages.

That said, there are other factors influencing the visibility of your ads; it isn’t just who bids the highest. These factors vary slightly between platforms.

Google Ads, for instance, also takes into account the quality and relevance of each ad message.

There is a “Quality Score” metric included in most Google tools for data analysis of PPC campaigns. The Q-Score measure gives ads a grade. A higher Quality Score leads to more ad views, even at lower bids. It’s Google’s way of rewarding the best ad experiences.

If a viewer clicks an ad, they arrive at a specific landing page on your site (or area of your Facebook page, Amazon listing, etc.).

It’s critical to design your landing pages to transform ad traffic into conversions. Otherwise, you’ll be paying for clicks and not receiving any returns on your investment.

Why Do People Use Google Ads and Other PPC Services?

Once you understand how PPC works, the advantages of this paid digital marketing strategy start to become clear.

The most apparent benefit is the added website traffic. If your business generates revenue from its site visitors, then it can be a valuable method of boosting that value.

For instance, if you can draw more visitors to your product pages, you create more potential opportunities to sell those items. These added sales directly improve your bottom line.

The same is true when you drive people to subscribe to paid services or book an appointment/reservation.

That said, your conversion activity (i.e., the action you hope site visitors perform) doesn’t have to be directly connected to revenue. You might find value in drawing more readers to a particular blog or having more leads sign up for an email newsletter.

No matter what activity you find relevant and valuable to your objectives, you can use PPC services to drive more people to participate.

You can also use PPC ad platforms to generate brand awareness. Remember, if no one clicks your sponsored content, you don’t pay your cost per click bid. Yet, viewers still “see” your messages and other content.

Types of PPC Campaigns

PPC is a broad term for any type of online advertising using the pay-per-click model. There are many advertising services that help marketers create and publish ads on the Internet.

Many of the biggest Internet companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.) offer advertising services. After all, for ads to be valuable, they must be pushed to a large audience. It’s these companies that have massive user bases worth advertising to.

Let’s run through some of the top PPC platforms and services available to digital marketers.

Google Ads: This is the number 1 ad platform. It’s hard to discuss PPC without answering, ‘what is Google Ads?’ It’s pretty obvious why Google Ads is a powerful ad platform; it gives advertisers access to the most popular search engine used by millions of users to connect with information and businesses. Google Ads is the most robust ad platform available, attracting the most users.

Google Ads primarily features search ads, appearing as “Ad” content on standard search results pages. However, there are also display ads, appearing as banners, square ads and other formats on various websites across the Internet. You can also find shopping ads for products, video ads for YouTube and more.

Microsoft Advertising: While Google is the most popular search engine in the US, there are alternatives that some users prefer. Bing and Yahoo attract millions of searches and are worthy platforms to target. Both of these search engines fall under the umbrella of Microsoft Advertising.

If you’re already utilizing Google Ads, you should be able to simply transfer your campaigns to the Microsoft platform. While Microsoft Advertising may not be as powerful as Google Ads, you’ll experience less competition, making it easier to secure top ad spots.

Amazon Advertising: If you’re selling products on Amazon, promoting those items is easy with the site’s advertising platform. This works no differently from search ads. If someone looks for a product relevant to your offerings, Amazon Advertising enables you to pay a small fee to have your products at the top of the list.

Amazon Advertising can be a very effective way to boost sales and get your products in front of more people. Creating a winning Amazon PPC strategy can directly increase your revenue.

Facebook Advertising: Social media sites like Facebook permit users to pay a small fee to sponsor their content. This pushes the message to more users, even ones that don’t actively follow your pages. You can expand the reach of any content you wish.

The advantage of Facebook Advertising and other social media ad platforms is you can target users by interests and other advanced metrics that other sites can’t see.

Examples of PPC Analysis and Charts

The best way to understand the value of charting in the PPC campaign management process is to look at examples of these visualizations in action.

Here are some examples of PPC (pay-per-click) charts helping advertisers make sense of their campaigns.

PPC (pay-per-click) Chart Example 1: Robert owns a small local lamp store, but wants to expand his reach and sales using the Internet. He begins listing his products on Amazon. To guarantee that people shopping for lights and furniture see his items, he invests some money in Amazon Advertising.

Without much experience, he finds the various metrics and numbers confusing. So, he invests in ChartExpo, a visualization tool for the everyday person. With PPC Trend line and Funnel Charts, he can more accurately understand how his items are doing on the Amazon Marketplace.

PPC (pay-per-click) Chart Example 2: Mary is struggling to achieve ad ranks during certain times of the day. Through a Google Ads competitor analysis, she discovers that competition is too heavy during the times she’s advertising.

She decides her best strategy is to find times throughout the day/week when ad performance is relatively high, yet there isn’t as much competition. She uses a Dayparting Chart showing conversions by the hour of the day.

This visualization helps her see the peak times where competition is highest and off-peak hours when she’s still getting conversions and there aren't as many other advertisers active.

PPC (pay-per-click) Chart Example 3: Andre is trying to improve his ad rankings in Google Ads. He knows that one of the best approaches for how to optimize Google Ads campaigns is to improve Quality Scores.

Andre uses a Quality Score Chart to better understand his ratings. This is essentially a ‘parts of the whole chart,’ where the ‘whole’ component is the overall Quality Score and the individual ‘parts’ are the three main factors Google uses to create this rating (ad relevance, expected click through rate and landing page experience).

The Quality Score Chart shows Andre the direct impact that improving these factors has on his ratings. When Andre takes the time to improve landing pages to load faster, he can check his Q-Score Chart again to see the difference the action made.

With this visualization, Andre not only has a better understanding of his Q-Scores, but he can also identify which factors need the most attention.

Elevate Your Pay-per-Click Analytics to the Next Level

Every ad platform offers some form of a dashboard to help you track the performance of your ads across various critical measures.

However, these dashboards are simplistic, designed only to provide a single place to view all your metric values (clicks, conversions, impressions, costs, etc.).

To actually begin analyzing those numbers and discovering insights, you need PPC management software. These digital marketing analytics tools offer more detailed pay-per-click reports and other features to help you dig deeper into your ad results.

In other words, it’s not enough to just see your current PPC stats. That’s what many solutions claiming to be the ‘best Google Ads reporting tool’ (or any other ad platform) offer.

Instead, you want PPC reporting software that enables you to actively monitor, track, detect and act on significant changes to your ad results.

After all, the performance of your PPC ads and campaigns is constantly changing. So many factors impact your results, such as what and how your target audience searches, how competitors are bidding and approaching their own ad efforts and more.

The key to effective PPC management and optimization is staying on top of these shifts and trends. It’s about knowing when to change your strategies to protect or improve your results.

Pay per click analytics tools give you the insights you need to achieve this objective.

Manage Your Costs and Spending Using Visual PPC Management Tools

One of the most crucial PPC metrics to monitor is the cost of your ad campaigns. It doesn’t matter if you’re driving traffic to your website if you’re paying a fortune to reach those results.

The best Amazon, Facebook and Google Ads tools should include features and PPC reports specifically for monitoring your costs.

Visual tools, like PPC (pay-per-click) charts, are exceptionally valuable because you can instantly see where your ad budget is going. You can even use PPC graphs at the keyword level to find the exact search terms you might be overspending to get.

Once you know the most significant sources of ad spending, you can analyze the results of these tactics to determine if that investment is worth it.

With PPC automation tools, you can even manage your costs in real time. For instance, Google Ads pay-per-click offers a Smart Bidding feature. This adjusts your bid values automatically to achieve more ad placements.

Whether you take an automated, manual or blended approach to PPC budget optimization, the goal remains the same: maximize your results for the least amount of spending possible.

This is particularly crucial for smaller advertisers that don’t have a huge budget. You want to ensure that every dollar you spend produces positive returns.

PPC (pay-per-click) charts take the guesswork out of your spending and allow you to monitor and control your costs actively.

Limited Ad Real Estate Collides with Immense Competition

As mentioned, basic pay-per-click software is built into each ad service’s platform. While you can manage your pay-per-click ads using these free PPC software tools, you’re limiting what you can see and effectively analyze with this mentality.

This can be dangerous, especially considering how competitive PPC marketing is. More and more businesses are recognizing the immense value of search results and online advertising.

Despite an ever-increasing number of advertisers, the amount of ad real estate hasn’t changed. For example, a Google search results page can have 4 ad on top, and 4 ads on the bottom of the page. Similarly, only a handful of Amazon pay-per-click ads will appear on a page.

Optimizing your PPC campaigns and bids to be one of the only ads to appear is not easy, especially when competitors are also doing their best to achieve the same goal.

If you only rely on the free PPC reporting tools offered with each service, you’re putting yourself on the same level as the competition. You see what they see, nothing more.

However, investing in advanced PPC optimization software, like the ChartExpo data visualization tool for digital marketing graphs, gives you an edge.

You’ll see things competitors don’t; creating opportunities to win more ad auctions and generate more impressions, clicks and conversions.

Share Valuable PPC Insights with Clients and Stakeholders

Often, PPC marketers are managing campaigns for a larger organization. Or, you may be managing PPC accounts for multiple clients in an agency setting.

In either case, you need pay-per-click reporting software capable of communicating the results of ad campaigns to these stakeholders and clients.

PPC (pay-per-click) charts are one of the best PPC reporting tools because of their visual nature. Viewing a visualization is far more effective and enjoyable than analyzing raw data.

There’s some research to back up the effectiveness of these charts and other visual tools. For instance, your brain understands visuals 60,000 times faster than text or numbers.

The human brain also remembers visuals more clearly and can recall them quickly. These are clear advantages when you’re presenting findings to stakeholders or clients.

While you may be very familiar with the PPC data and the various campaigns you manage, other audiences aren’t as comfortable.

Delivering PPC insights, Google Ads trends, etc., in a visual format helps establish the familiarity these audiences lack. Anyone can understand a line graph or bar chart.

Visuals also make any PPC report more engaging. Managers and clients won’t dread browsing your Amazon, Facebook or Google Ads performance reports.

The visual components will make them look forward to your presentations and ensure they reach the proper conclusions to understand the story behind all their PPC campaigns and metrics.

See What Raw Metrics Aren’t Telling You

Raw metrics on their own don’t tell you the whole story, not even close.

Let’s say you look at a particular campaign and see that you have 100 clicks this month. Maybe you even know that your clicks have been up 12% since last month.

But, so what? This intel has no value unless you have the context behind why this increase occurred. This is especially true in PPC advertising because there are so many factors that contribute to your results.

If you can identify which levers and conditions are responsible for the positive increase, you can easily replicate the success in the future.

Visually analyzing your PPC metrics through digital marketing graphs lets you see the whole story behind your data. With compelling data storytelling, you can easily understand the critical context influencing each positive or negative change in your accounts.

When you only analyze raw data, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of numbers. Spreadsheets do very little to mitigate this overload.

You may hit a point when you jump to a conclusion or decision because you’re too fatigued from staring at the wall of numbers.

With charts, there is no fatigue or overload. Visuals offer a digestible format that makes data accessible and engaging to interact with. You don’t have to struggle to extract insights because PPC (pay-per-click) charts make them jump right off the page!

Make Timely Pay-per-Click Optimization Decisions

Considering how competitive and dynamic the PPC ad market is, making quick decisions is vital to success.

Acting too slow can cause you to miss promising trends. Similarly, you may overlook potential risks, resulting in performance loss.

For instance, imagine you target a keyword typically costing around $0.60 a click. Increased competition for this search term has caused it to spike to $3.00.

You’re suddenly paying 5X what you’re used to for traffic from this keyword. You continue to overspend if you don’t recognize and act on this change quickly.

You can create an example for a positive trend too. Maybe you notice a new relevant keyword is skyrocketing in popularity, suggesting a shift in audience interests.

Being one of the first advertisers to recognize this promising new opportunity means you can take advantage of lower costs. Plus, it gives you time to position your ads and brands before competitors notice and follow suit.

However, moving quickly and making timely decisions must be done with accuracy. You don’t want to jump to conclusions for the sake of responding quickly.

This is why charts make for some of the best tools for Google Ads, Facebook Advertising, etc.

Since you can read a chart several thousand times faster than interpreting raw data, you already have an incredible head start on recognizing valuable changes and taking action.

Charts provide the necessary context and view you need to spot an opportunity and risk and know how to respond.

A PPC Monitoring Tool to Actively Mitigate Risks and Capture Opportunities

The ever-changing nature of PPC ad campaigns requires you to actively monitor results to stay ahead of the various shifts, trends and other patterns impacting your results.

In other words, Google Ads optimization or Amazon PPC management isn’t something you should do once in a while. It should be an ongoing, continuous effort.

Naturally, you have lots of other responsibilities and projects you’re managing. So, you need a tool that enables you to actively monitor your campaigns with little effort.

Digital marketing charts and PPC graphs offer the perfect Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft or Google Ads analysis tools. They make exceptional dashboards where you can quickly look and see if performance is moving up or down.

The visual aspect of charts means you can physically see trends, shifts, outliers and other noteworthy patterns in the data. It takes only a few moments to glance at your PPC (pay-per-click) charts and spot any changes requiring further attention.

Recognizing positive and negative changes is vital to the success of your campaigns. You need to identify possible opportunities to seize while mitigating risks simultaneously.

When you fix negative changes to stop a possible risk, you prevent a loss in performance. Conversely, when you capitalize on a positive change and opportunity, you increase your results.

Consistently creating these increases and preventing losses is a recipe for PPC success.

Spend Your Time Acting Instead of Analyzing

Many digital marketers grimace when they hear about active monitoring and continuous optimization. It sounds like a lot of work, right?

The issue facing many professionals is there are only so many hours in the day. No one has time in their busy schedule to spend hours every day fussing over their PPC campaigns.

Luckily, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft or Google Ads campaign optimization doesn’t have to eat hours of your time.

With reports and dashboards rich with digital marketing charts, you can view your campaigns at a glance and recognize the most significant insights. This limits the time you spend analyzing the data, leaving more time for actions.

You can spend just a few minutes each day adjusting your campaigns to correct the most prominent issues and capitalize on the best emerging opportunities.

This is one of the most powerful benefits of charts and PPC automation tools. They help you focus on the activities that matter most, rather than wasting energy on the time-consuming components.

By optimizing how you spend your time when managing your PPC accounts, you have more of it left for other tasks and projects. Campaign optimization takes only a few minutes a day with digital marketing charts!

Ask a Specific and Valuable PPC Analysis Question

The goal of any analysis is to discover new, actionable intel you can use to increase your results. It starts with a question, something you want to know or learn about your strategies.

This question should relate to your PPC objectives and overarching organizational goals. In other words, each analysis question you pose should directly impact your performance, however you may define it.

Having a PPC analysis question serves several purposes in taking raw PPC metrics and translating them into actionable, data-driven decisions.

First, the analysis question informs which metrics you need to pay attention to and what data to gather.

For instance, if you want to know the best times during the day to advertise, you’d need your key performance metrics charted with hour of the day and day of the week data. This combination will help you identify when performance is at its highest throughout the week.

Your analysis goal or question will also help you decide which PPC (pay-per-click) chart to utilize. With the above example of improving your ad scheduling, a dayparting chart works wonderfully.

However, if you’re trying to improve ad visibility while keeping costs low, the Quality Score Chart by ChartExpo is the better tool.

It all depends on the purpose behind your analysis.

Your starting question will also keep your analysis process on task. You won’t get distracted by other details you discover along the way.

Sometimes, marketers find themselves chasing every new insight without ever finishing the analysis of one. It’s better to answer one question before you begin asking others.

Determine Which Metrics and Chart Type to Use

With an analysis question in mind, you can begin gathering the components you need to develop your PPC (pay-per-click) charts and start extracting actionable intelligence.

There are two parts you need: data and a chart type.

PPC advertising utilizes several metrics so marketers can understand how their ads perform.

Clicks, impressions, conversions, CPC, impression share, Quality Score and click through rates are just some of the digital marketing analytics you need to pay attention to, to understand your ad campaign’s results.

That said, you can’t listen to everything at once, nor should you. Instead, you want to highlight which metrics are relevant for each analysis project.

Even then, it can be a challenge. Let’s say you want to analyze the reach of your ads. Do you look at raw impressions? Impression share? Impressions lost? It isn’t always clear which metrics provide the best value to your analysis.

Once you’ve solved that obstacle, the next component is to choose a chart type. This is where ChartExpo shines. It has a library of specialized visualizations designed for PPC advertisers.

Here are some of the PPC (pay-per-click) charts you’ll find:

• Quality Score Chart
• Dayparting Chart
• Pareto Chart
• Keyword Scatter Plot
• Funnel Chart
• Trend line Chart
• And more

Don’t be afraid to try multiple chart types to find the best visualization for your data and analysis goal.

How to Make a Google Ads Excel Chart and Other PPC Graphs

If you want to take advantage of ChartExpo’s PPC graphs and other visualizations in Excel, here are some simple instructions to follow.

The first step is to download the ChartExpo add-in for Excel. You can search for ChartExpo on the Microsoft AppSource site. The download and installation process is straightforward; just follow the prompts as they appear on your screen.

Once installed, ChartExpo will appear the next time you open Excel. You’ll find it either under the “File” or “Insert” menus in the top toolbar. It will depend on your version of Excel.

After you locate ChartExpo in your Excel tool, opening it will show you the top level of the charting library. You can begin scrolling through the options to find the visualization you want or use the search bar to look up a chart by name.

With a chart selected, you need to supply ChartExpo with your data. Since it’s an Excel add-in, your spreadsheet data is right there for easy access. You can click and drag to highlight which parts of your table to visualize.

If you’re satisfied with your chart type and data selections, you can click the button to create your chart. Your new PPC visualization appears instantly alongside your spreadsheet.

You can make minor edits, like changing fonts or colors. It’s also vital that you remember to save your chart as a PDF or image file. This makes it easy to share and communicate your PPC findings with stakeholders, clients, colleagues, etc.

How to Utilize PPC and Google Ads Graphs in Google Sheets

Many digital marketers use Google Sheets and Google Ads in tandem. Since both services are in the Google family, it’s effortless to export Google Ads data to Google Sheets for analysis and charting.

Utilizing ChartExpo in Google Sheets is just as easy as with Excel. To get started, click on the “Extensions” tab at the top of the page, followed by “Add-ons” and “Get add-ons.”

This will open the Google Workspace Marketplace on your screen. Enter ‘ChartExpo’ into the search bar to find and download the tool.

Once successfully installed, you’ll find ChartExpo under the “Extensions” and “Add-ons” menus.

From here, the process is the same as in Excel. You select your PPC (pay-per-click) chart type, add your data and create the visualization in just a few clicks.

Again, it is vital to remember to save every chart you make as an image or PDF file.

Even though Google Sheets automatically saves for you, this will keep a separate file of the chart that you can include in various forms of communication.

Spend Less Time Charting and More Time Discovering Insights

ChartExpo makes chart creation fast and user-friendly. Its simple visualization system reduces the process to just three easy steps. You can actually transform data into charts with just a couple of clicks of the mouse!

After you download the ChartExpo add-on for Google Sheets or Excel, you’ll find the tool within these respective programs.

Opening ChartExpo shows you the entire chart gallery offered by the tool. You can browse each option or utilize the search bar to look up a PPC (pay-per-click) chart by name.

For instance, entering “Quality Score Chart” into the search bar will immediately take you to this visualization.

The second step, once you select a chart type, is to add your data. In most cases, you’ll be able to simply click and drag to highlight the section of your spreadsheet you wish to visualize. Otherwise, you can input the data yourself.

The final step in the ChartExpo system is the easiest. After you’re confident your data and chart type are correct, click the “Create Chart” button and your work is done.

You can save your new chart and share it with others via email, presentations, PPC reports, etc.

The speed and accessibility of ChartExpo’s visualization tool mean you can spend almost no time making charts, reserving all of your energy for the important stuff — discovering insights and improving your campaigns.

No Added Stress or Confusion from Confusing Scripts

Google, Facebook, Microsoft or Amazon PPC management is challenging enough. The goal of charts is to alleviate that confusion, not add to it.

When you Google PPC software, avoid so-called ‘best’ Google Ads optimization tools and other solutions that utilize scripts and codes in their Amazon, Facebook or Google Ads reporting templates.

This is very common with many charting tools because spreadsheet programs like Excel or Google Sheets only allow users to insert foreign visualizations through JavaScript coding.

Essentially, these scripts tell these programs how to display the charts you want to use.

The problem is that people without any experience in programming languages will struggle when using a Google Ads excel template or Google Sheets amazon PPC analysis chart using these scripts.

Again, the last thing you want to do is add more stress and headaches to the PPC campaign management process.

Luckily, ChartExpo automates all of the writing and editing of these scripts. All you have to do is use the tool’s interface.

When you edit your chart type, data or settings, ChartExpo instantly updates the script for you. You never even have to see the coding yourself!

ChartExpo Offers Many Digital Marketing Charts for PPC Analysis

ChartExpo isn’t just an easier way to produce the same PPC (pay-per-click) charts you’ve seen in other charts. Instead, it is a complete charting library that includes many new visualizations not offered by other tools.

With ChartExpo, you effectively double how many charts you can use to tell your visual data stories.

When it comes to charts for PPC campaign management, ChartExpo delivers several superb options:

• Quality Score Chart: Google Ad reports need to consider Quality Score. This is a Google-specific measure that helps determine ad rankings, costs and more. The Quality Score Chart shows each component of this rating and its impact on overall rankings.
• Dayparting Chart: This is an excellent tool for optimizing your ad schedule. It shows your performance by the day of the week and the hour of the day. You can locate the exact times to run your ads for the best results.
• Pareto Chart: The Pareto Principle dictates that 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts (approximately). This is true in PPC. Roughly 80% of your PPC results will come from a small minority of your keywords. The Pareto Chart helps you analyze many items to find the most vital components.
• Funnel Chart: Your PPC results produce a funnel shape. At the top of the funnel are your impressions, the middle shows your clicks and the bottom represents your conversions. Ideally, you want to maximize how many impressions become clicks and clicks turn into conversions. The Funnel Chart is a great way to depict these results visually.
• Trend line Chart: One of the critical tasks in PPC management is detecting trends and shifts in your results. Trend line Charts are ideal for this duty. These slimmed-down line graphs not only help you recognize these crucial patterns, but also allow you to track multiple metrics side by side.
• Keyword Scatter Plot: Displaying keyword data with a Scatter Plot design is a highly effective way of identifying search terms with low costs and high search volume. Using these two metrics on adjacent axes, you can take hundreds of possible keyword targets and find the ones with the most promise.

ChartExpo Pay-per-Click Tools Create a Competitive Advantage

Having more charting options is convenient for your Google, Facebook and Amazon PPC campaign optimization efforts. However, it is also a potent advantage over your competitors.

With added PPC (pay-per-click) charts, you can see things that other advertisers can’t. This means detecting opportunities that others miss, enabling you to capitalize on emerging trends at the ground level.

Considering how competitive PPC advertising is (and how limited ad real estate is available), having a competitive advantage is a massive benefit.

Thanks to ChartExpo’s different charts and graphs for PPC advertising, you’ll spot valuable trends ahead of the competition. You’ll also avoid any potential risks or costly pitfalls.

ChartExpo’s speedy, straightforward visual analysis system means you never have to wait to discover new ways to improve your campaigns.

While other PPC advertisers are looking for the next insight, you’ll already have a long list of actionable trends and discoveries to pursue.

You never have to think about what to do next because your PPC graphs clearly indicate the most significant insights to investigate.

With timely, data-driven decision-making for your PPC campaigns, you ensure that every dollar of your ad budget is properly invested in winning strategies.

There is no guesswork or assumption involved when you have PPC (pay-per-click) charts showing you clear evidence of the most valuable changes to make to your campaigns.