It is inevitable that one of your clients will use Adobe as their source of truth, which can throw a wrench into ways you can test across your account. Let this be a source of how I have found a workaround to marry the data for tests.
In my case, I have been working with a client who doesn’t rely on Google pixels to track their transitions or revenue, thus making any post-click data on Google obsolete. This has made it quite difficult to do simple optimizations such as search query reports to more nuanced adjustments like audience implementation. Below, I walk through a process that I have relied on within one of my accounts to test audience bid modifiers. This has become a quarterly check-in with my client and I have been making sure we are using the data that we have in our audiences to our advantage. If you are new to working on Adobe and you are unfamiliar with the platform, I highly recommend reading Lara Lowery’s blog, “Adobe Media Optimizer Set Up for Beginners”.
Audience Bid Adjustments
Audiences are the lifeblood of PPC now more than ever, especially since the changes we have seen and will continue to see regarding privacy. Yet, how can we utilize these audiences correctly without the proper access to post-click data within Google? Fear not, here is the process I used to attribute Adobe’s post-click data to Google’s pre-click data.
Step 1: Build Your Workspace
Set up a blank Google Sheet and build out your three tabs, “AMO Data”, “Google Data” and “Merged”. This will be your workspace.
Step 2: Pull The Data
Obviously, we cannot use the Google post-click data for this, but we still pull a full report from Google and I have found that doing this every 90 days works best for optimizations. Now for Adobe, I pull an “AdWords and Bing Audience Target Report” within Adobe Advertising Cloud. From there, I select the appropriate account and campaigns I am testing, and include the corresponding KPIs for the campaigns. (In this example, I will be focusing on revenue, ROAS, and pageviews.)
Step 3: Merge the Data
Once you have the reports pulled, paste them within the Google Sheet in their respective tabs, then open up the merged tab.
(Example of Data in AMO tab:)
(Example of Data in Google Tab:)
To merge this data, I have our top cells as follows:
- Campaign
- Audience
- Cost
- Revenue
- ROAS
- Pageviews
- Audience ID
In every cell, I have the sheet reference the data from the AMO Tab because that is our source of truth for our KPIs. Additionally, I can match these up to our Google audiences by using the Audience ID numbers with the formula, “=index(‘Google Data’!E40,MATCH($A2:$B2,’Google Data’!$A40:$B40,0))” and that should populate the corresponding audience ID to your campaigns. This process will allow you to decide the appropriate bid adjustments for your audiences and place them within Google.
(What your Final Merge Sheet should look like:)
Conclusion:
I believe that bidding at specific audiences is the future standard for Google moving forward. We have already seen how privacy laws have changed the way we advertise on the platform and we can expect more changes to come. Don’t let a different platform like Adobe hold you back from making key optimizations to increase the overall performance of your campaigns. This is not just a solution for audience bidding but can be a perfect process to follow when testing other optimizations.
