When running a PPC advertising campaign, you may face a few dilemmas. One of the most common is figuring out what metrics to track to determine if your efforts are successful. There are countless opinions and content available on how you can measure your PPC success. All this information can get confusing quickly.
Here, you can learn more about different PPC metrics and how they provide insight into your PPC campaign performance.
Traffic Focused PPC Metrics
Some advertisers will automatically look at things like cost-per-click or click-through rate when determining if their campaign was successful. AdWords offers a lot of metrics that are traffic-focused, and that can be extremely useful. This includes things like impression share and device segmentation.
While these are a good place to start, it is important that you don’t become distracted and lose sight of your basic goals, which should be to generate a profit. One of the most common mistakes that are made is failing to set up conversion tracking. This allows you to measure conversion actions, such as a lead or purchase submission in the ad platform. This occurs by putting a code snippet on the order confirmation page or thank you page.
If you don’t have this code, the only measurable metrics are traffic-related, including things like click-through rates, clicks, and search impressions.
Unfortunately, this data can’t really let you know if campaigns are beneficial to your business’s bottom line. You have to find out if the clicks are translating to useful leads.
Conversion Focused PPC Metrics
If you are currently using conversion tracking, then you are already on the right track. In fact, you are doing better than most of the competition.
If you aren’t doing this, set up conversion tracking right away. This is easy to do on most platforms.
With conversion tracking, you are looking at more than just sales and web leads. Unfortunately, about 75% of advertisers who take phone leads aren’t tracking them as a conversion.
For some industries, phone calls are the primary source of leads, which means it is important to include the calls in your conversion tracking efforts. Some call tracking platforms have pre-established ways to set this up, so take advantage of this.
You can find out how many leads your company got but don’t know how many followed through with the purchase or sale with conversion tracking.
ROI-Focused PPC Metrics
If you want to make sure you are using the most meaningful data, ROI is an essential metric to track. You should track leads from click to close and then measure your revenue on a per-lead basis. When you know what campaigns are generating results, you can duplicate them.
As you can see, there are more than a few PPC metrics you should keep up with. Be sure that you keep these in mind, as they will provide you with a better picture of how successful your campaigns are and when you may need to make changes or adjustments.