Evaluating Campaign Performance Over Time

Today, let's assume you want to analyze a specific campaign or ad creative. We are going to show you, how to analyze the performance in time, compare periods, and identify drops in performance.

For our example, we will take a look at 2 campaigns:

• US_PAIDSEARCH_GOOGLEADS_VID_CARS

• US_PAIDSOC_AWS_CARS

If you would like to read about how to identify the right campaigns for further analysis, you can do so in our first playbook about identifying best-performing channels.

And if you need a general introduction to multitouch attribution is available as well.

1. Campaign Performance over Time

Check the interactive demo for step-by-step instructions on how to execute the comparison of two periods.

2. How to Decide What to Do with the Campaigns

Now, we know how the campaigns perform but what to do with them? There is not an easy answer but it should be good to check:

• How the campaigns perform also in comparison with other campaigns – even if the campaign performs worse in comparison with its performance in the past, it can still perform better than other campaigns and should be kept.

• If the campaign performance is improving, we should check if there is an opportunity to scale the campaign.

Let's do those steps together in the next demo:

Lastly, you always need to utilize the data together with the knowledge of what changes have been made in the past in those campaigns. Sometimes, the problem might be in the ad creative but other times there could be a change in audiences, budgets set up, etc. Do not forget that sometimes, there may also be an external factor that causes a particular campaign to perform better or worse.

We recommend taking an iterative approach to any optimizations. Once you identify a possible improvement, make the change, check the impact, and iterate. You will never achieve an optimal mix, it is the route of continuous improvements which will help you to get the most out of your marketing budget.