From reaching your target audience to only paying when people see and click on your content, PPC marketing has many advantages in keeping your business competitive in this increasingly digital age.
That said, many people run campaigns but don’t know how to measure their success or outcomes. They don’t understand which PPC metrics to examine.
Are you not so sure what you’re doing, either? We’ve got you covered. Let’s get into how to measure your metrics.
Clicks
With a PPC campaign, you want to see how well your clicks are working! This is especially important if you’re aiming to boost your brand awareness.
Clicks lead to conversions, and conversions lead to sales. However, the number of clicks is not enough. You need to be able to interpret trends or differences in the clicks.
Any recent declines in the click volume can indicate problems with the campaign. You may need to reassess your keywords. Additionally, you may need to examine your budget.
Likewise, surges can indicate that it’s a good time to take advantage of the search volume by increasing your marketing budget.
Quality Score
Google measures the relevance of your keywords with its Quality Score metric. Factors that can impact this score include:
- quality of your landing page
- the relevance of the keyword to the ad group
- the relevance of the keyword to the search queries
- click-through-rate of the keyword associated ad
- click-through-rate of the URLs in the ad group
Google uses your Quality Score to quantify and interpret your ad rankings as well as how much you pay per click.
In other words? A lower Quality Score means you’re probably wasting both time and money.
To check your score on Google Ads, click the Campaigns tab at the top of the page. Select the Keywords tab, and then click the white speech bubble to see the ratings.
Conversion Rate
Your conversion rate indicates how many people clicked through your ad and went on to complete the intended action on your landing page.
This is very important. After all, you don’t want to waste your time or money making an effective advertisement only for people to gloss over it. Furthermore, you don’t want to have a great product or service without a way of them finding your business.
Cost Per Conversion
That said, the cost per conversion matters tremendously. If you have to fork over more money to get a new customer than the customer is worth, you’re mismanaging your priorities.
Your cost per conversion refers to the total cost you paid to receive a sale or lead. If you spent $100 on clicks and got two sales, your cost per conversion is $50.
For some industries, this is a meager rate (if, for example, your product costs $10,000). For others, this may be astronomical (if you sell $5 greeting cards).
There isn’t a specific cost per conversion rate to aim for. It comes down to how much you value the sale, which means you need to assess your profit margins.
If your business has many repeat purchases, you’ll want to look at the lifetime value of customer acquisition. It may be beneficial to have a higher cost per conversion if you’re hoping to keep them long-term.
Total Conversion Value
Your total conversion value is an essential metric to use to determine campaign efficacy between keywords and ad groups. After all, some customers spend more when they look for certain products.
For example, let’s say you have an online clothing business. People click through your site, buy a dress, and leave. But, you may notice customers who are looking for a new jacket may also want to buy other products like jewelry, shoes, or jeans.
By themselves, the t-shirt and jacket may cost around the same amount. The total conversion value of your jackets is higher. That’s because the average order value tends to be higher.
Figuring out your total conversion value takes time. You need to understand how your inventory works and what people are buying. You also need to be willing to assess different trends over time.
Impression share
Your impression share measures the percentage of potential impressions your ad generates. For example, let’s say there are 100 searches for one of your keywords. Let’s then say that 40 times, your ads show up for that keyword.
Using the formula Search – Ad Visibility = Impression Share, you have a 60% lost impression share.
Google looks at lost impression share concerning lost budget and ad rank. By using these metrics, you can determine whether you need to spend more money on your campaign or increase your Quality Score (or both).
Return on Ad Spend
Your return on ad spend (ROAS), refers to the performance you generate from your PPC expenses. You can simply calculate this figure by dividing the profit you yield from your ad campaign by the total cost of that campaign.
At the end of the day, this may be your most essential metric. It tells you how much your investment was worth – and what kind of result you should reasonably expect if you increase or decrease your PPC expenses.
Final Thoughts On Assessing PPC Metrics
When done effectively, PPC can be a dynamic and even explosive force for your marketing campaign. That said, you need to know how to interpret the PPC metrics to make the best decisions for your campaign.
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