Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising creates new opportunities for businesses of all sizes to market to prospective customers in a more targeted and cost-efficient way, especially when compared to traditional ad mediums like print
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising creates new opportunities for businesses of all sizes to market to prospective customers in a more targeted and cost-efficient way, especially when compared to traditional ad mediums like print, billboards, and radio. These benefits are largely made possible by digital advertising networks like Google and Facebook that collect billions of data points from users to support effective demographic targeting.
For marketers, PPC advertising is a complicated and ongoing optimization problem. Using the data made available through major ad platforms, marketers work to design ads that effectively target prospects in the right demographic and with intentions that match campaign objectives. In this way, digital marketers are both creatives and data analysts.
The combination of N-gram analysis & PPC represents a powerful new analytical technique that PPC marketers can use to identify profitable keywords, write more effective ad text and optimize ad spending and marketing ROI.
For an overview of the PPC advertising model, check out our Pay-Per-Click Advertising Glossary Page where we explain how PPC works and the benefits it provides for growing a business.
Let’s review how PPC works in very simple terms:
Ad platforms collect many different types of data related to the performance of advertisements and keywords. The marketers that use these platforms must regularly check, investigate, review and analyze this data to measure the success of their advertising efforts and work towards increasing ad performance and ROI. For each marketing campaign, advertisers look at information such as:
An ad campaign may include one or more pieces of creative and may target tens or hundreds of keywords. Within each campaign, ad platforms track the exact keywords that triggered each display of the advertisement. For advertisers, this means you can see exactly what keywords prospects are typing in before they see your ad. The next step is to analyze keyword data to discover which ones perform best. Typical metrics for keyword performance within an ad campaign include:
Advertisers use this data to optimize keyword targeting for each campaign by selectively bidding on the most profitable keywords that demonstrate the best ROI.
N-gram analysis is a statistical method that advertisers can use to discover the most profitable keywords for a given ad campaign.
The definition for N-grams comes from natural language processing, (NLP) an area of machine learning application responsible for technologies like voice-to-text, speech recognition, language identification, and auto-correct. An N-gram is defined as a contiguous sequence of N words from a specified sample of text or speech.
For example, we can look at a simple text sample and turn it into N-grams. Our sample can be a basic sentence:
“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”
If we were to convert this sentence to 1-grams, we would have 9 of them:
If we converted the sentence to 2-grams, we would have eight of them:
So, what’s the significance of reorganizing the data this way? Well, if we took a lot of query data for a single ad campaign, we would likely discover that certain keywords and phrases are present in many of the search terms that generated impressions for the campaign. N-gram analysis allows advertisers to see which of these keywords or phrases that reoccur within a campaign are best correlated with positive ad performance.
In N-gram analysis and PPC, advertisers look at all the keywords that generated impressions or clicks for a given ad campaign – these keywords are taken together as the text sample for the N-gram analysis. The next step is to group the keywords into N-grams of the desired length – typically either one, two or three-word phrases. N-gram analysis is basically interested in three things:
Using this technique, advertisers can identify the specific words and phrases that are most strongly correlated (either positively or negatively) with ad performance for a given campaign.
ScalixAI is a performance-driven Google Ads agency specializing in helping high-growth, AI-first companies scale with predictable, profitable customer acquisition. Founded by an ex-Googler with 9 years of insider advertising experience, we manage the entire Google Ads lifecycle—from campaign strategy and account setup to conversion tracking, analytics, and ongoing optimization. Our data-centric, AI-powered approach ensures you know exactly which campaigns are working, why they’re working, and what to do next to outpace your competitors.ScalixAI is a performance-driven Google Ads agency specializing in helping high-growth, AI-first companies scale with predictable, profitable customer acquisition. Founded by an ex-Googler with 9 years of insider advertising experience, we manage the entire Google Ads lifecycle—from campaign strategy and account setup to conversion tracking, analytics, and ongoing optimization.
Most clients see performance stabilize by month three. Google Ads isn’t a slot machine—it takes time to compound.
No. We work month-to-month. All we ask is that you give us three months to prove the results.
While Google Ads is our entry point, we also support LinkedIn Ads, Reddit, and X campaigns when needed.
The CRO audit covers your landing pages, CTAs, forms, and overall user flow. We’ll flag what’s holding back conversions and recommend fixes. If changes require design or dev resources, we’ll hand over clear action steps for your team, so you know exactly what to adjust.
As an ex-Googler, I know which recommendations are useful, and which are just there to hit Google’s internal targets. We’ll filter their advice for you, implementing only what actually helps us hit revenue goals.
Weekly reports show spend, conversions, CPL/CPA, and how we’re tracking against projections. “Good” means campaigns are meeting efficiency targets. “Scalable” means we can push budget and expect the same or better efficiency without breaking ROI.