Andy Taylor says, “Just a few years ago, the paid search landscape could adequately be summed up as “text ads on desktop computers.” This simplicity meant analyzing performance didn’t require too much slicing and dicing to get meaningful takeaways from paid search data, and often a simple brand vs. non-brand look would do the trick.

With the rise of additional ad formats and devices, however, understanding search performance requires that PPC managers and analysts dissect their data in several specific ways before coming to any conclusions.

Here, we delve into the most important of those segmentations and why each is critical in paid search performance analysis.

Device segmentation is critical

According to Merkle’s Q1 Digital Marketing Report (registration required), the share of paid search traffic coming from desktop computers is now just 47 percent, with 39 percent coming from phones and 14 percent from tablets”.

Three of the most important data segmentations for any Google paid search analysis

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