Conversions were down week on week and your boss is looking for some extra explanation to go with your weekly report. We know that the drop in conversion rate was consequential, but how many conversions did you lose because of it?

I understand that conversions are down
I understand that it’s likely because of the drop in conversion rate
What I don’t understand is how impactful that was
So for example, how many conversions did we lose thanks to lower conversion rates?
What did the other factors contribute? Can we work that out?

It’s important to know how your performance is trending, because you need to take steps to correct poor performance, as well as being quick to double down on good performance. Most marketers will identify conversions have fallen, then look deeper into what metrics may be causing it. If CTR (Clickthrough Rate) has fallen, it might be an issue with our ads. If CVR (Conversion Rate) has fallen, maybe it’s the quality of the traffic. We could also look at search impression share and see if maybe we’re being outcompeted for inventory. Looking at these metrics as a way to explain what’s going on, and then taking action to correct performance issues, is a key part of every marketer's role.
However it’s not enough to just eyeball the metrics. Yes CTR is down by 50% or Impression Share is up by 10%, but how much individually did those metrics contribute to the overall conversion number we hit? Without knowing how impactful each change was you can’t properly prioritise the right actions to improve them. In order to figure this out, you need to decompose the contributions of each metric and display it in a waterfall chart. The chart shows initial conversions on one side, positive and negative contributions by metric in the middle, and finally the resulting conversion numbers. It can be thought of as a kind of marketing funnel visualisation, because each metric contributes to the final figure, and the sum of their contributions totals to zero. The maths to do this is a little complicated, because it requires stepwise calculations, so we recommend using WeDiscover’s free template.

Waterfall Charts

hello so in this video i'm going to be
taking you through the newest tool that
we have been putting together which is a
performance decomposition tool um in
this video i'll take you through kind of
how to set up for your cells and
actually how to interact with the tool
to hopefully get the most out of it
before getting into some of the details
i think it's just useful to give an
overarching view on what decomposition
is in case some of you are not familiar
with it so effectively decomposition
charts are a way to see the drivers of
changes between two periods so for
example in the context of google ads if
we wanted to understand why conversions
dropped week on week or why conversions
dropped in the last 14 days compared to
the previous period before that we can
use decomposition to really easily see
exactly what those what has driven those
changes in conversion volume
there's obviously all the other kind of
metrics we can look at and when we get
into using the tool i'll go through
those in a little bit more detail but as
an overarching point they're just really
useful charts for getting a quick view
on why
something might have changed
so in terms of how we set this up what
we first need to do is navigate to our
we discover public github repository and
if we then navigate into performance
decomposition in google ads you'll find
a script called google ads export what
you'll effectively need to do with this
is copy it
and then navigate to your google ads
account so if you've never implemented a
script before what you need to do is go
to tools and settings
scripts
and this will take you to this interface
where you just need to add a script
new script
and it should bring up this blank
template where you're able to actually
paste the script that you've just copied
from our github repository
so this sometimes takes a couple of
seconds to load so while we just wait
for this to load um
shouldn't be too long now here we are
what i need to do is copy this script in
and then if i scroll to the top of the
script you'll notice there are a few
general configurations that you might
want to put together so this is where we
now need to go to the templated google
sheet and create a copy
so if we go to this template
file
make a copy
you can name this kind of whatever you
want so let's just say
test
and then you can save it to the specific
folder you want to so i would recommend
saving to your drive your company folder
whatever makes sense to you
so i just hit cancel there
i have a demonstration one here
so if i just
copy this url at the top
navigate back into my google ads account
and then paste that url just as is from
the bar into the spreadsheet url you
should then be good to go
if you do want to kind of specifically
use certain accounts within for example
an mcc or you want to exclude certain
accounts from being able to be accessed
in this decomposition you can do that
here by adding the ids in a list similar
to one shown here
so once that's all done what you'll need
to do is kind of preview the script
that'll probably then ask you to
authorize it so if i just hit authorize
i'll need to authorize kind of the
script to
be able to access it fairly standard
practice if you've ever used google
scripts before and then the next time i
run this or preview this i'm able to
actually export the data
so for the sake of this example
let me just put the script name as test
decomposition
and hit save
so now i've done that if i just go back
to my scripts
you should see test decomposition is one
of these scripts we can now use
and i'm able to then schedule this on a
daily basis a weekly basis if i want to
and what this is effectively doing is
exporting the data from google ads into
this google sheet which enables you to
then interact with it and create
specific performance decomposition
charts so for example if you want to be
able to look at this on a daily basis
you might want to schedule the data to
get exported on a daily basis or if you
only care about on a weekly basis or
even an ad hoc basis you might want to
do a slightly different schedule or just
run it once
so once that's all set up you just then
need to navigate to your new copy of
your google sheet so in this instance
i've already got one set up that has all
the data um in the background and what
you'll notice is a variety of different
kind of buttons and settings here
generally the way that we do tools from
a we discover perspective is we try to
have drop downs where you're able to
interact with the data
so i'll basically just talk through this
this interface as a whole and then we'll
go through playing around with some of
the options and see what we can do with
it
so at the top here we've got two sets of
controls
you're able to kind of select your
account um you're able to add filters
you're able to select the specific
decomposition metrics you want to look
at
and then on the right hand side we've
got a period section so this is where we
might want to be able to say okay i want
to look at
last week or the last seven days worth
of data versus the period before that
what you'll notice is it'll kind of run
what that actually looks like from a
date perspective and tell you if you
have data available for that period so
if you are flagged as not having data
that's where you might need to go back
into google ads and rerun the script
this next section is then just something
that you can use
to look at metrics in that period so if
i was just interested in comparing for
example impressions i could click
impressions and because i've got no
entity selection at the moment this
shows nothing but if i was to just go
through very quickly
and just
select a couple of options
what you should notice in a second
actually i just need to hit show all
here is it shows me the difference in
impressions between the period that i've
selected so this is more for you to be
able to quickly look at the change on
change over a selected period if you
would like to but it is worth noting
that this has no direct impact on the
decomposition charts this is more for
your interest so if you kind of don't
want this or you don't need this feel
free to kind of hide these rows and then
they won't be showing at the bottom here
is this pre this area that automatically
populates based on the settings you
select so obviously we haven't gone
through and adjusted everything and run
it yet so this is all showing us null
but when we actually go to run run this
you'll see that this populates there's a
decomposition chart
cool
so
let's actually just go and run this so
what i've done here is i've selected my
account
i've said i want to look at all
campaigns
i've selected conversions of
decomposition metric and then the
conversion action of just conversions
and i'll explain what these mean in a
little in
a second but let's first run this
script and what you'll see happens in
the background is you have this
processing and finished and that then
populates at the bottom a decomposition
chart
so what we're seeing here is for a
simple view of conversions of
the last seven days versus the
previous seven days before that
we're getting a decomposition chart
which just shows
what is driving those changes in
convergence so what we're saying here is
each of these kind of areas is isolating
how that area is affected
the
overall conversion so for example if we
were to isolate just impression share or
the change in impression share we're
saying based on our change in impression
share we would have expected or seen an
uplift of 62 conversions
what we can see very easily here is okay
our impression show improved
but because of our conversion rate
dropping more significantly our overall
change in conversions dropped so you see
this initial which is the very first
week of the
the
previous period and then the subtotal
which is the last seven days
cool so we can then play around with
adjusting this and and changing things
and equally i can add in some different
metrics here so i can say okay what with
the change in clicks what do conversion
rate look like and we can see here
clearly that that change in conversion
rate was was significant and again it's
shown here as well
and we can also play around with days so
let's say i want to see last week versus
the period before that this should
automatically update these dates
and then um
it also automatically updates the
decomposition at the bottom so you can
see this kind of changes depending on
the the filters that you obviously have
if you wanted to compare
a period to a slightly different
previous period you can choose previous
period minus one or previous period
minus two so in this context if
last week is our period previous period
is obviously the week before that and
then period minus one is the week before
that so you're able to play around with
the exact dates you're looking at but if
i was just to change this you'll see
that these dates change
and you can see what the comparison is
versus the initial
so we're saying the initial here is the
15th to the 21st of august and then the
comparison is last week so not 28th 29th
of august the 4th of september
cool
so that's how you kind of play around
with dates
you're also able to do custom dates
and all of these different defaults
in terms of the entity obviously in my
instance i've only got a single account
but let's say i want to only look at
campaigns that contain brands so in this
example i have a very simple campaign
naming convention where i've just got
brand contained within it if there is
just brand what you'll see here is this
has changed the way the decomposition
looks at the bottom that overall volume
has dropped because obviously we're not
looking all campaigns
and the way that the decomposition looks
is different this also updates
impressions clicks conversion rates etc
so you get to see this all flow through
so if i just navigate back to show all
the only other kind of options you have
are the decomposition metric and the
conversion action if we start with the
decomposition metric what this is
effectively showing is the different
ways that we can manipulate the data to
look at different things depending on
what we want
so for example if
for your specific instance cost per
acquisition is most important
if i just select that and then
[Music]
rerun it
what you should notice is that this then
changes the way that the decomposition
is actually put together
so the reason we've done it like this is
because decomposition is basically
breaking down all of the steps that
happen between one week and then the
next week so for example
if we had 130 conversions what were all
of the different things that could
contribute to changing those conversions
in that period of time that has caused
this new figure so that's how we're
effectively looking at when we look at
decomposition so depending on what
metric we select for decomposition we
might want we we might need to consider
different things so for example
conversions doesn't necessarily need to
consider cost on its own but if we have
cpa we do need to consider the change in
cost because that obviously has a direct
impact on what the cpa will be
there are obviously a couple of other
metrics so potentially if you're a
client that focuses
more specifically on revenue or roast
then maybe you want to select those
conversion action is then just to give
you a little bit more flexibility in the
specific conversion you're looking at so
in google ads it's quite common that you
would have kind of a primary conversion
but you might also have some secondary
conversions that you're also interested
in let's say in this instance you have
sales as your primary conversion but you
actually want to see quote form as your
secondary conversion so you might want
to run a decomposition looking at that
quote form so if i just rerun this
it should change some of these figures
if it didn't automatically do so
i think it automatically did it so
you're able to actually flexibly play
around with what exactly you're looking
at from a conversion perspective if that
is something that is important
cool
so the only other things that worth
noting at the if i just move myself
at the very bottom there is an option
for options so this sheet is hidden
because we think that um a lot of these
defaults
are
important in all instances but if there
was a specific situation where you said
actually
we are not a revenue based business we
don't
necessarily want to or from a google ads
perspective we're not a revenue based
business we don't really care about
seeing conversion value and rows in that
drop down you are able to remove them
here if you would like to but we
probably wouldn't recommend doing that
just because it's nice to have that
flexibility and also in some of the
these kind of instances this is getting
auto populated based on the data so just
be careful with playing playing around
with options but if you do really want
to
get rid of some of these hard coded
figures then you can do
but yeah just just be cautious i guess
when doing something like that
great so that's kind of how you play
around with decomposition and that's how
you use the the tool we've put together
i think the main takeaways are
just make sure that you copy a template
of the script otherwise everyone will be
able to kind of see the data if you're
populating it into the template
and also
make sure that you've got the schedule
set up as you want in google ads because
if you want this data to always be kind
of populated and always be usable then
you might want to have that schedule in
place so that it's always working
um please let us know we'll reach out
via this kind of email at the bottom
here if you do have any feedback or
concerns and we'll be more than happy to
try and help you out
great i hope that video was useful
and thanks taking time to watch it

What is the advantage of using a Waterfall Chart?

What are the different metrics that together determine conversions?

How many conversions did we lose by having a lower conversion rate (CVR)?

Which of our metrics contributed positively to conversions?

What’s the process for using this template?

How much did a metric move the needle? It’s easy to say which metrics went up or down week on week, but how much did they actually contribute to conversions? To figure that out you need a waterfall chart.

Vexpower Learning Certificate of Completion

Congratulations Zawadi Irungu 💪