PPC is a great online marketing channel for your business. If done correctly, paid advertising can be one of the most powerful ways to generate more leads, sales, and revenue. All you have to do is define your goals, choose the right keywords, create impressive Ad copies, and bid right. While you need to keep track of all these things when you start a PPC campaign, understanding how you will measure the success of the campaign is equally important.
In this article, we’ll talk about the most important PPC metrics for measuring the success of your PPC marketing.
Which Key PPC Metrics to Use to Measure Your Campaign’s Success?
The overall success of a paid advertising campaign boils down to one important thing, i.e., tracking the PPC metrics to grow the ROI. This helps you understand the key indicators of your campaign’s performance, which is something you should work on the right from the start.
When you know what you want to achieve through a PPC report templates and how you will measure the progress, you are in a better position to make necessary changes to the campaign earlier. Below are the most common PPC metrics-
- Clicks
- Impressions
- CTR
- Average CPC
- Cost
- Conversion rate
- ROI/ROAS
- Quality Score, etc.
What Should You Measure?
There is an overwhelming number of metrics that can be used to keep track of the campaign’s KPIs. Does this mean that you need to measure all the metrics? Certainly not!
Concerning yourself with endless data that has zero impact on your ROI is a wastage of time and energy. While all these metrics are important for evaluating the PPC campaign’s performance, your business goals help you decide which ones you should focus on more.
For instance, suppose your goal is to remain on the first page of SERP consistently. In this case, you can easily secure a top position on the SERP as long as you know what to pay per click. Make a list of high-value keywords, and bid high to be competitive.
Here, you need to track the number of impressions you get. Also, make sure to keep the impression share above 95% to maintain your position in the top five results. If the impression share drops, you have to increase the CPC amount of the daily PPC budget.
Similarly, if you want to generate more leads or get more sales, the conversion should be the topmost metric to consider. While most marketers track this metric via sales completion or the total number of purchases, you can also use phone track conversions as a metric.
PPC Vanity Metrics
PPC Vanity metrics can be divided into the following categories-
- Impression-based
- Engagement-based
- Behavior-based
Impression-Based Metrics
Impression-based metrics track the total number of impressions or traffic a PPC campaign gets. If you want to boost your brands reach, using this metric alone is vain. The reason is, spending your budget just to get impressions isn’t wise. Though traffic and impressions are good, they alone can’t generate revenue for you. If people click you’re Ads, but the conversion rate is low, you have more to lose. So, make sure that the clicks convert into sales.
Engagement-Based Metrics
Engagement-based metrics, like CTR, are also not worth anything if you get little to no conversion at all. While these are good, they don’t measure your campaign’s success. Checking the relative CTR of similar Ads to gauge your campaign’s success is a better approach rather than spending the entire budget on increasing your CTR.
You can calculate this by dividing the number of persons who click your ad by the number of individuals who see it. A high CTR means that your ad is liked by more audience; this will increase your cost per click and overall conversions.
Behavior-Based Metrics
One example of a behavior-based metric is time spent by a user on a site. When a user spends a lot of time on your website, it does not necessarily mean that conversion will occur. You may get high views and visits per page, but not conversions. Thus, if you keep pondering solely on the data acquired by these metrics, it will not determine your PPC campaign’s success in the long run.
Aside from this, there are relative or internal campaign metrics, like negative keywords, wasted Ad spend, budget per Ad, competitive benchmark, etc. When you focus on internal metrics only, you start focusing on the campaign rather than the results you will get. It is good to check them occasionally and ensure that all is well; but, don’t just focus on these minor metrics and neglect the other major ones.
Other Metrics:
- Bounce rate: Bounce rate shows specific aspects of your campaign that has to be optimized. This is gauged by the total number of visitors who actually visit your site and the ones who leave with responding to the CTAs. A high bounce rate means you are targeting a higher audience.
- Search impression share: This includes the total number of times your ad could appear to the total number of times it was actually visible to the viewers. Further, a low score on this will have a negative effect on your website’s performance and on your campaign.
Conclusion
The key to measuring your paid advertising campaign’s success is to prioritize the PPC marketing metrics more than others. If you focus on irrelevant keywords, you will end up setting your PPC campaign for failure. Have it in your mind that the ultimate purpose of a PPC campaign is to get more ROI. Thus, the metrics you track should deliver the actual results and value. Focus on the vital PPC metrics that affect your conversion rate, generate qualified leads, and get you more sales. This way, you can direct your Ad campaign towards success in the future.
