The PPC Investigator for Social helps you pinpoint exactly what caused changes in your account performance. Instead of guessing why a metric shifted, the tool provides data-driven analysis and shows how different metrics in your account are connected. For instance, it can confirm whether a drop in clicks came from fewer impressions or a lower CTR.

By visualizing metric dependencies in the 'Cause Chart' of the PPC investigator, you can:

With this tool, you move from "what happened?” to “why it happened?” and take action with confidence.

First, select the metric for which you noticed a change and choose the date range over which you want to compare performance.

When you choose to compare any date range to the previous period, the system considers the same number of days just before the selected current date range.

For example, if today were June 24th, and you take the last 7 days from today to compare to the previous period, then you’d be comparing the week from 18th to 24th to the week from 11th to 17th.

The campaign filter, located in the top left corner of the tool, allows you to further fine-tune the investigation. You can choose which campaign types, networks, and devices to include.

Once you've selected the metric, date range, and campaigns, you can view the results in the Cause Chart.

The concept of the Cause Chart is based on the fact that the performance of every metric depends on the performance of other underlying metrics. In the Cause Chart, we use the relationships between different metrics to show potential causality.

The PPC Investigator features a thumbs-up/thumbs-down icon that indicates whether the trend is positive or negative, allowing for adjustment to a color-blind-friendly mode. You can enable this by checking the 'Show icons' box on the upper right, as seen below.