7 useful Excel formulas and functions for PPC

Use these tips to quickly analyze performance data and identify high-impact PPC optimizations that will move the needle.

Leaning into Excel skills can help you become a more efficient worker and improve the quality of your analyses.

One of my favorite parts about Excel is that I continuously find ways to be more efficient. Several functions and formulas can help expedite PPC tasks.

What follows are seven Excel tips to help you quickly identify high-impact PPC optimizations that will move the needle for your brand or client.

Excel 101: Foundational formulas

These are the Excel skills I first introduce to new hires who are expected to take on performance reporting and bulk sheet builds.

If you find yourself in a similar role or feel that those tasks are cumbersome, try incorporating the following into your process.

Delta

Incremental impact
Concatenate

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Excel 201: Preparing datasets for analysis

Pivot tables are a PPC marketer’s best friend. However, to best leverage pivot tables, you must invest time to ensure the integrity and granularity of the dataset.

The following functions/formulas included here are most impactful when preparing a dataset for analysis, but the applications are far-reaching.

VLOOKUP

Transform date to week
Categorization based on text
Joining complex datasets
Joining complex datasets process and use cases.

Finally, I want to highlight how the techniques described previously can be leveraged collectively to enhance the quality of analysis.

If you’re following the best practice of pulling platform data at the most granular levels, it’s common for data to contain multiple segmentations (a.k.a., attribute columns in the dataset).

When combining data between two platforms, the datasets must have the same level of granularity. Otherwise, data that you pull into your original dataset will be inaccurate.

To join complex datasets, use CONCATENATE to create an additional column that joins together all segmentations in the original dataset. This should be replicated in the second dataset, using the same order in the concatenation. See Step 1 for an example.

The newly formed column now serves as the connector between the two datasets. Using the VLOOKUP function, search for this newly created column in the second dataset and designate which column of data you’d like to append to dataset #1. Double check the VLOOKUP worked correctly by comparing the sum of the newly imported data to the original table it was imported from.

Happy number crunching!

There’s a lot of information to digest here. Yet, we’ve only scratched the tip of the iceberg here.

Don’t give up if you’re struggling with Excel. It takes time to learn the functions and their capabilities. Search for some videos that walk you through live examples – those were particularly effective for me.