Marketing Dashboard: E-Commerce Paid Search Ad Campaigns

4 min readJul 8, 2023

Introduction

A US shopping mall is running an e-commerce as one of its sales channels. To support this, they run several paid search engine ad campaigns throughout June to November 2021.

Objectives

You’re tasked to make a dashboard to monitor the performance of the paid search marketing campaigns run by the company and find out some insights regarding the performance.

Dataset Description

The dataset contains the data of 5 months (Jul-Nov 2021) ad campaigns run by the shopping mall. It holds several key informations such as and not limited to target device, promotion type, impressions, number of clicks, conversions, amount of sales, gross profit, and cost.

User Persona

People in the marketing team are the ones to use the monitoring dashboard.

Based on the interview you conducted with them, you discovered several key requirements for the dashboard. To put it simply, as the member of the marketing team, they need to be able to:

See the performance of the ad campaign in monthly basis.
See the performance by the target device.
See the performance by the promotion type.

Dashboard User Flow

Dashboard Visualization & Insights

1. Marketing Funneling Performance

Dashboard showing the marketing funneling

Click-Through-Rate (CTR)

34.5% of people who saw the ads are clicking it and go to the shopping mall website.
34.5% of CTR is considered high compared to across-industries benchmark of a mere 4% to 10%.

Conversion Rate

90% of people who clicked the ads didn’t continue to purchase.
Overall, only 3.6% of people who saw the ads ended up buying something from the shopping mall.
Conversion rate of 3.6% for the paid search is higher than benchmark of 2.69%.

2. Finance Performance

Overall Finance Performance

For these 5 months, the cost for running the paid search is higher than the gross profit generated out of it, with the loss margin of almost 40%.
The AOV of 134 USD is considered good compared to the benchmark of 100.25 USD.
The gross profit margin of 4.6% is very low compared to the benchmark of 35%.
The CPC of 0.79 USD is considered normal compared to the CPC benchmark of 0.67 USD.

Finance Performance by Ad Group

1:1 (Buy one get one) promo is the most used promotion type in these 5 months for both mobile and desktop devices.
Despite the large amount of budget spend on this promo type, financial performance is the worst among all the promotion types.

3. Marketing Metrics

Here are some insights regarding the marketing metrics:

1. Number of Clicks and Click-Through-Rate (CTR)

The total number of clicks are moving along with the decrease/increase of the paid search spending.
However, the conversion rate area relatively the same.

2. Number of Conversions and Conversion Rate

The total number of conversions are moving along with the decrease/increase of the paid search spending.
However, the conversion rate area relatively the same.

3. Total Spending and Cost-Per-Click (CPC)

The spending of the paid search been decreased gradually from July until October and abruptly hiked up in November.
The CPC stayed relatively the same despite the increase of the paid search spending.

4. Amount of Sales, AOV, and Gross Profit Margin

The total amount of sales are moving along with the decrease/increase of the paid search spending.
The average order value (AOV) reached its peak in September, but kept declining until November.
The gross profit margin stayed relatively the same despite the increase of the total number of order.

Conclusions

The CTR, CPC, and conversion rate of the paid search ad campaigns are considered good compared to the benchmarks.
However, the gross profit margin is very low. This issue should be addressed promptly by taking actions such as but not limited to promoting new products or cross/upselling more effectively.