6 Excel functions that every PPC Marketer Must Use

In our last article, we told about the excel functions that every Social Media Marketer must know. Today, we bring to you some important excel functions that will make the life of all the PPC marketers easier. PPC marketing involves a lot of excel sheets and the following functions will help you analyze them easily.

TRIM and PROPER Function

When you have too many descriptions or ad copies in front of you, it is not possible to check spaces of each one manually and thus using the TRIM function helps. It removes all the unnecessary spaces in a string. Along with the TRIM function, you can also use the PROPER function when you are working headlines as that will capitalize the each word of the sentence making your headline look more presentable.

After using the PROPER and TRIM functions, the headline of your ad will automatically become more presentable. You can also use the keyword insertion function to capitalize the first letter or the whole keyword.

VLOOKUP Function

The VLOOKUP function proves to be very helpful when you want to compare your data of two different timeframes. Even when you want to add new keywords in your list, you can use the VLOOKUP functionto compare the old keywords with the new keywords. Sometimes you may accidently add a keyword which already exists and this may increase your ad spends without any improvement in the results. With the help of VLOOKUP function, you can be sure that none of your keywords are repeated.

In the example above, by using the VLOOKUP function we found out that 2 of keywords added already exist so now that we are aware of this, we can immediately pause one of the keywords to avoid conflict and track the clicks better.

NETWORKDAYS Function

It is not necessary that all your clients will want to run ads on all the days. Sometimes we come across clients, who want their campaigns to run only on weekdays. Usually, we allocate the budget per day by dividing it by 30/31 but when you are not advertising on weekends or some other holidays, this may not work. You can either calculate the number of days manually or simply use the NETWORKDAYS function. NETWORKDAYS function will help you to find the number of days in a month after excluding the weekends and other holidays mentioned by you.

By using the NETWORKDAYS function in the above example, we came to know that we are supposed to allocate our budget for 21 days. These 21 days do not include any weekends and also the 24th April since we considered it as a holiday. You can also add a range of holidays if you want.

CONCATENATE Function

CONCATENATE function helps you to combine data from different cells. This function is extremely useful when you want to create a fully functional display URL. Even when you want to add tags to your URL, this function can prove to be very useful.

You can also use this formula to create standard ad copies. If you have a list of 100 products and you are making ad copy as ‘Buy this device now’ then you can easily use CONCATENATE function and create hundred such ad copies in one go.

LEN Function

LEN function in Excel helps you to determine the number of characters in a string. LEN function is very helpful when you are drafting your ad copies as ad copies should not exceed certain number of characters. You can also add a conditional formatting option, so that you come to know whenever you exceed the character limit.

In the example above, through LEN function we come to know that the characters in the headline of 1st Ad copy are 32 which exceeds the limit of 25 so you can make the changes accordingly.

Conditional Formatting

When you are working on too much data, there may be things that you may want to highlight and in such instances conditional formatting can be really helpful. For example, if you want to highlight the keywords that received more than certain number of clicks then you can easily do so within seconds by using conditional formatting.

We have formatted column B in such a way that whenever the number of clicks are less than 100, the particular cell will get highlighted. You can format your data as per your requirement.

You can learn more about the TRIM, PROPER, CONCATENATE, LEN and other text function here.

If you think, that there are other functions that are helping you in a great way then do share with us and others by mentioning them in the comments box below.