If you are a novice Google AdWords practitioner, you would know there are tons of metrics available to track and analyze your efforts towards the SEM, but tracking each and every metrics would be confusing and cumbersome. Since we all have limited bandwidth, it is effective to narrow down to some limited number of key metrics that would provide you with a proper insight into the results of your PPC campaigns.
These five key metrics will give you a great overview of the adwords campaign’s performance, and tracking of these over time will provide a valuable data of your success. But note that you should also keep a track on other available metrics over a period of time.
Important metrics to measure PPC campaign success
1. Quality score
Quality Score is a metric by Google to determine your Page Rank. Ad relevancy, CTR, and landing page optimization are the factors that determine your Quality Score. Google use quality scores to determine the ad rankings and the amount you pay per click for your PPC campaign. Thus it is necessary to maintain a good quality score. Low-Quality Score is an indication that your factors need some tinkering.
2. Click-through rate
Another important metric to consider in PPC campaign – Click-through rate is one of the most important factors in determining your quality scores. It also helps in knowing whether your ads are relevant to users or not. Low CTR is a sign that your ad creative or the keywords need an improvement.
3. Conversion rate
Conversion rate answers several important questions that help the businesses in understanding where there are right now. It helps in determining:
- Number of people who clicked the ad and proceeded to landing page to complete the desired action
- Number of users who made a purchase
- Number of users who signed up for a free trial
- Number of users who filled up any query form or subscription letter
4. Cost per conversion
Is the total cost paid for an ad in relation to the success in achieving the goal of that ad? This determines whether you have attained a return on your investment. It is of no use if you have to pay more to gain a new customer than that customer is actually worth to your business, then your campaign is failing. To rectify it you need to analyze and optimise your ad.
5. Wasted spend
Wasted spend is a measure of how much your marketing budget is going down the drain by paying for clicks that don’t convert. The best way to avoid unnecessary spends is by optimizing your keywords, by which you can filter out the unnecessary traffic for certain keywords that drain your money. And also by creating negative keywords, you’re preventing your ads from displaying for search queries that contain that keyword.
Tips for client success
Prepare objective based reporting
PPC campaign advertising model is primarily used with certain objectives in mind such as increased lead generation, brand expansion or more sales. It is your responsibility to ensure that your client gets an objective based report for the entire work to get a better understanding of the progress and the KPIs achieved.
Use simple and plain language
Most of the PPC campaign experts do a mistake by complicating their reports with exaggerated language and a lot of data, charts or graphs. Majority of the PPC reports contains numbers obtained from AdWords, web adcenter or web analytics. What clients and high-level manager want is a simple and plain summary of what goals have been achieved and in what way.
Offer in-depth analysis
Though most of the PPC reports contain data, graphs, impressions etc, most of them fail to include minor details like the exact time of the day or week that works best for the campaign. These details must be considered while allocating your PPC budget. You can also analyze which part of the website works best for the ads and what impact it will have if moved to another part. These small tests can turn out to be beneficial in the long run.
Customize your report
What most PPC experts do is following the same template to prepare reports every time. Though this doesn’t bother few clients, most of them expect the reports to be a little customized containing the major details highlighted. Remember that every client has different requirements and you can’t expect to put different insights in one single form of template.
Update regularly
It is always advised to keep updating the report on a regular basis for your client’s convenience and yours as well. Regularly updating the reports simplifies the entire process and you do not have to look back into the documents to analyze any of the data.
Include your further plans
This is one of the important things to keep in mind – do NOT forget to include your further plans. It is appreciable to give your client a reminder of how far you’ve come from the last report before proceeding to your projected growth. Discuss the strategies that you want to implement later, ask for their recommendations, look for new suggestions and work as a team.
At the end, it’s all about how you approach the data analysis and presentation each time.
Prove them that you matter
Lastly, prove your clients how much you are important to them. Your every single effort should be seen in your report and the overall success of your client’s business.
Make an effort to dig into your performance dashboard and get comfortable navigating between them. Try segmenting and analyzing your data in new ways & explore the different metric columns and get familiar with them. There’s no reason to be intimidated by the data; just dig in!
.png)
