Chapter 3: Quadrants explained

If you’ve ever been a share trader you’ll know how important it is to pay attention to the primary indicators, and how layering the information given by those indicators with other less important factors will form a picture on which you can act with confidence. “Budget Pacing” and “Performance vs. Benchmark” are those primary indicators in PPC. Other metrics like conversion rate, conversions/impressions, CTR etc are derivatives of these two primary metrics and therefore less important in terms of identifying which clients need your time today.

Use quadrants to focus activity – meet ‘the Sweet Spot’

When you use a scatter plot to chart your client’s budget pacing (X-Axis) against CPA/ROAS pacing (Y-Axis), you can instantly categorize your clients into one of five groups (four quadrants plus the “Sweet Spot!). This makes it easy to know who needs attention and what types of actions are required in order to move them to the Green Zone (see below).

Adpulse Account Performance PPC Quadrant Management

In Adpulse you will see this month’s pacing plotted against performance, with the performance % being calculated by looking at this month’s performance vs your benchmark (customizable, but often set to the last 3 months’ average).

This data is updated hourly, so you have the most up-to-date representation of the performance of your accounts. Couple this with using Quadrant PPC Management, you’ll know quickly which accounts need what actions to get them back to the Sweet Spot.

Green

The “Goldilocks zone” – where both account performance and budget pacing are just like baby bear’s porridge – not too much, not too little, but juuuust right . You’re meeting or exceeding your performance goals and spending very close to your budget target.

In a perfect world, all your clients would be here of course, but we all know that this is not going to be the reality.

We’ve listed the other zones below, in order of recommended priority, and we suggest checking the scatter plot each one to two weeks (depending on how busy you are) so you can rank your accounts and action accordingly.

Red

Your account is spending too quickly and performance is poor – these accounts are often the ones you need to spend time on most urgently, as this is where most clients churn.

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Download the free checklist

Orange

The optimization zone – your performance isn’t great (gulp) but at least you’re not throwing good money after bad.

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Yellow

Your performance is great but you’re just not spending enough of the budget. Pretty easy to fix.

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Blue

The opportunity zone – this is the easiest zone to pull back to green as your performance is great but you are spending too quickly. You either need to reduce spending or get more budget from your client.

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Coming up next

In the next section, we will explain how to manage clients in the RED zone, including your downloadable checklist.

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