A way to analyse all the data we obtain, we use machine learning and automation more often now in digital marketing. Data science does this by turning theories into evidence. Big data is one data science term you might come across. It is large and complex data sets used to identify trends and patterns that can help businesses make better and more personalised decisions for their customers. In PPC, that kind of technology can work wonders for optimising budget spend, improving CTR, and overall performance.

Before technology was as good as it is now, some decisions were made by best guesses and past trends. That didn’t always work good and people and businesses lost a lot of money. Today, data science can help find trends to save people millions and give businesses the chance to improve customer relationships and services.

How can data science help PPC?

Whether you use Google Ads or other PPC alternatives, automation is at the forefront. Other benefits of data science in PPC include:

• Identifying outliers in impressions and clicks over time to confirm whether significant changes are due to seasonality or something else.
• Creating better split tests.
• Creating and optimising remarketing lists.
• Tailoring PPC campaigns aligned to particular audiences and when they’re online.
• Identifying unusual traffic.
• Understanding buyer’s preferences.
• Deeper analysis of ad copy.

Find data sources and cluster them. The quality of your data sources can affect your insights so use the best tools you can. Software like SEMrush, Google Data Studio, and Tableau can help collate and analyse data quicker and easier.

PPC needs to work together with all marketing channels. PPC professionals strength lies in combining their efforts with everyone within a marketing team. That means collaborating with sales and using CRM data, developers who help create landing pages and websites, SEO, and customer support. Data insights can provide goals and best practices for everyone to follow to ensure a smooth customer journey from impression to goal conversion.

Visualize PPC performance.  With data visualisation you can turn all that into insightful information. Performance reports are important to showing where PPC is succeeding or needs improvement and the ability to visualise that data is important too. Data visualisation can find trends, normalise larger datasets, compare data over time or help further testing. Sometimes, all it takes is a simple bar chart or line graph to show you where things are going right or wrong.

Data in isolation has no meaning and being able to test it in controlled conditions can lead to important insights. That’s the beauty of data science – it provides knowledge you can use to make better judgements. In PPC, those judgements can impact metrics like ROAS (return on ad spend), Quality Score, impression share, and cost per conversion.