If you manage Google Ads accounts, you have likely added ads to ad groups and checked their performance over time. It is generally a good idea to have two or three ads in an ad group, running at the same time. Then you can compare them, pause the ads that are not performing well, then introduce new ads.

However, you may have noticed that ads are not always shown equally during a given period. Even if they are, there is often not enough data to determine that one ad is actually better than another. Since we are really looking at a sample, the outcome is not exactly definitive for the population.

Another issue is that you likely have a number of campaigns, with a number of ad groups. That leaves you with a lot of ads to review and determine which ones should be paused (so you can introduce new ads). A corollary to this function is what type of new ads should be introduced – that’ll be for another post.

At the heart of successfully managing media is analytics. In other words, your media success is in proportion to how deeply you utilize your data to make decisions. To that end, in this post I’m going to show you how to create an R Shiny app to run through your ads and display a list of ads that should be paused based on a statistical analysis. Continue reading →