Root Cause Analysis in PPC Investigator
Geetanjali Tyagi avatar
Written by Geetanjali Tyagi
Updated over a week ago

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Root Cause Analysis

After identifying which metric needs to be worked on, the Root Cause Analysis goes a step further and highlights the exact Campaigns/Ad groups/Product partition/Keywords, etc. that were responsible for the change in an account. 

It shows top movers that are significant contributors to the change in the account when compared across the two date ranges. You can view the top three positive and negative movers for a particular account.

These can be further broken down into sub-contributors to check where exactly the drop/surge happened. The tool finds the contributors by taking into consideration individual keywords/ad groups/network/device and even specific combinations like keyword+device or network+ad group. 

Positive Top Movers:

This shows the Campaigns/Ad groups/Product partition/Keywords/etc that had the highest increase in the metric that is being investigated. These elements had the highest contribution in increasing the metric across the account. This makes it easier to recognize what is working well for the account in order to replicate it in other campaigns or ad groups. 

For example, if mobile as a device shows up as a top contributor for an ad group, you can consider setting mobile bid adjustments for other ad groups.

This also makes it easy to identify which level is contributing to an increase. For example, Campaign A saw a growth of 100% and its ad group X saw a growth of 160%, and it's keyword C saw a growth of 188%, this can help a user identify the cause for the increase right down to the keyword level.

Negative Top Movers:

This shows the Campaigns/Ad groups/Product partition/Keywords/etc that had the highest decrease in the metric that is being investigated. These elements had the highest contribution in decreasing the metric across the account.

Quick Insight Tips

Identify the pain points and work on improving them in the account to counter the decrease in account performance.

A 100% change may indicate that the Campaign/Ad group/Keyword may have been paused which is impacting account performance. This can help make a decision on whether you would like to enable it or keep it paused. Also, if the 100% change is at the keyword level, then it is possible that the keyword has been moved to a new ad group.

Easily identify what is causing a drop in account-level performance. For example, an ad group saw a 50% drop and under that ad group, a keyword saw clicks drop by 100%. In this case, it is clear that other keywords in that ad group are performing well to cope with the 100% drop in clicks from the identified keyword. This helps make a decision on whether that keyword should be paused or optimized.

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