Analyzing paid-search trends with line & area charts
1. Analyzing paid-search trends with line & area charts
Trends are very important in the digital marketing world. For instance, at first sight, if the number of clicks on an ad are trending up, then you must be doing something right, correct? Not necessarily! You also need to look into the number of times the ad was seen and how much of the budget you're allocating to the ad.2. Digital marketing data set
To avoid this, we will be focusing on two metrics that are dependent on each other: cost and click through rate, or CTR. When analyzing these metric trends, you want to keep in mind a few things. First, you always want the CTR to increase, which means that your ads are more appealing. Second, cost going up or down can either be good or bad, which is why the tendency is to reference cost with the CTR. For instance, if the cost increases over time and the CTR increases over the same period, that is a sign that the ads are performing well. But, if the cost increases and the CTR decreases, then the ads are not performing well.3. Visualizing CTR trends
The line chart is great for plotting any number of trends, including showing basic trends. It is one of the most recognizable charts available and it is an invaluable part of any trend analysis. Here, we see both Google and Facebook yearly CTRs plotted from 2016 to 2018. The line chart makes it clear that Facebook ads have been steadily dropping in CTR, while Google ads have been growing each year.4. Visualizing CTR trends
The area chart is like the line chart, except the area under the curve is shaded and it does a good job showing the relative difference between trends. The downside to this chart is that it will become messy if too many trends are plotted on a single area chart.5. Visualizing cost trends
The stacked area chart shows the aggregate of all trends. Essentially, the trend line on top is really the aggregate total of all the trends, where the space between the lines is the amount contributed to the total by each trend. We use the cost data here because there is a clear aggregate total for cost. Since CTR is an average, the stacked area chart would be misleading to the user and should not be used.6. Compare area charts
In this example, you can see how both of the sources are growing in spending. In comparison with the CTR chart, this means that Google is out performing Facebook. We know this because Google has cost and CTRs trending up, while Facebook only has cost trending up.7. Change chart type
Before we move on, let's discuss ways to edit your chart. To change the chart type, go to the chart editor and use the chart type dropdown to select the new chart. Here, we are changing the area chart to a stacked area chart.8. Add a series to a chart
To add a series to a chart, open the chart editor and go to the series header. Then, simply click the add series button and highlight or manually enter the range of cells of interest. Here, we are adding the Google CTR data to the line chart as another series.9. Reformat data set for trend analysis
Note that, when creating charts from your data for trend analysis, it is best practice to reformat your original data set so that columns can easily be added as a series to the chart.10. Let's get to work!
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