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The PPC Investigator is an insights tool available for Google Ads and Microsoft Ads that'll help you find exactly which element in a given account caused a metric to increase or decrease, and whether it's a keyword, placement, or an entire network that caused the changes.

Answering questions such as why conversions/clicks dropped the previous month can give you great insights into account improvement.

The PPC Investigator has a feature to enable icons to show if the trend is positive or negative, to adjust to a colorblind-friendly mode. This is enabled by checking the box on the upper right, as seen below.

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 exact same number of days just before the selected current date range.

For example, if today was 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 - 24th to the week from 11th to 17th.

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 Root Cause Analysis for specific metrics can be accessed directly from the Cause Chart. Whenever you see the "locate" icon, as shown in the screenshot below, you can press it to go directly to that metric's Root Cause Analysis.  

Read more details about the Root Cause Analysis here.