Pay-per-click ads are a great way to drive more awareness for your brand and more traffic to your site. And if you’re working with the right PPC firm, you should be getting regular updates on the performance of your paid ads. Turning those updates into actionable insights though is a task easier said than done.
Businesses, especially small and medium-sized ones, need to be smart with their marketing budgets. It’s important that you’re able to qualify where your ad dollars are stretching the furthest and where you might need to make changes or dial it back.
In terms of PPC ads and the PPC firm that you work with, the goal is to identify key measures of success that you can use to monitor your paid ad campaigns and ensure that they’re pulling their weight. Here are seven of the best ways to do that.
1. Clickthrough rate
If you’re paying for clicks, then it makes sense that your clickthrough rate would be a pretty telling metric in terms of how your ads are performing. The higher the rate, the better your ads are doing and the better job your PPC has done so far as choosing the right keywords and targeting your ads to the right audience.
If you have concerns about your clickthrough rate, go back to the drawing board with your firm. It may be just a matter of tweaking the keywords or optimizing your ad design.
2. Conversion rate
Click-throughs are a key metric, but the real goal is to turn those clicks into conversions. Look at how many clicks on your PPC ads led to conversions, whether those are purchases, newsletter subscriptions, demo sign ups, or any other behaviors that you’re driving toward.
Keep in mind that a low conversion rate suggests you need to make click-through focused adjustments. For example, if you’re pulling in a ton of clicks but very few of those are leading to conversions, there’s a strong possibility that you’re not reaching the right searchers with your ads and that your firm needs to work on their targeting strategy.
3. Bounce rate
Just as you want to know which clicks led to conversions, you also want to know which clicks led to dead ends. Your bounce rate can illuminate areas of your site that aren’t optimized for activity the way you want them to, and like a poor conversion rate, could suggest that you’re PPC firm isn’t targeting your audience correctly.
4. Cost per conversion
A good way to quantify just how well your PPC firm is putting your ad dollars to use is to calculate your cost per conversion—i.e. the dollar amount spent on each converting behavior. This is a bigger tell of ad success than your cost per click, since, as already noted, clicks themselves aren’t really the true driver of value.
Equally key: put your cost per conversion into context. Look at it not just in terms of your overall spend on the PPC campaign but in terms of how much a particular conversion is worth to your company. Purchases and demo requests are going to have more of a positive impact on your bottom line than social follows and blog subscriptions, even if the latter conversions are still important.
5. Search impression share
This handy metric uses a percentage score to tell you how many times your PPC ad showed up for a user versus how many times it could have shown up if you’d had it completely optimized. The higher the percent, the better your ad is doing. Budgetary constraints could be to blame for a low search impression share ratio, but it could also speak to individual areas of your PPC campaign strategy.
6. Your larger marketing goals
When you first started working with your PPC firm chances are that together you established some highly personalized goals for your campaign above and beyond standard conversions. Always keep these goals in mind as metrics when you’re evaluating the wins and losses of your campaign, since they speak to your unique needs and objectives. Examples might include wanting to drive traffic to a particular page on your site more than others, or to build awareness around a specific promotion.
In many cases, these goals will be the same—or at least highly related to—your overall conversion goals. The crucial part is that you identify what they are and regularly evaluate whether they are being met.
7. Your Quality Score
Quality Scores are big picture measurements that let you know how various aspects of your campaign are performing when taken all together. The higher your Quality Score, the better your keywords, targeting, design, and more are doing. This score also takes into account outside factors, such as the landing page that your ad is leading to.
Aside from giving a window into how your ads are doing, your Quality Score is critical for guiding your strategy. Google uses these scores to determine how much you pay per click, plus where your ads rank on a page.
Taking into account all of these metrics, you should have a very clear idea of whether your PPC campaign—and the firm running it—is meeting its mark.