When you manage a Google AdWords account to supplement your account organic SEO You know that there are a variety of metrics that can be tracked and analyzed.
Sometimes it can be confusing and overwhelming.
Since we all have limited bandwidth, it’s a good idea to narrow down the key metrics that really give you meaningful insight into how your data works and how it works paid search campaigns.
Before we look at the key metrics to track, we’ll review a checklist to review when reviewing your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.
PPC audit checklist
- Check your location and target settings.
- Rate your ad against your landing page.
- Use ad extensions.
- Rate your keywords.
- Measure your success with analytics.
1. Check your location and target settings.
When monitoring your PPC campaigns, the first step should be to check your location targeting settings.
To do this, make sure you have properly set up the regions where your business operates. Note that you can also exclude locations where your company has no business or cannot deliver.
You can also review geo-reports to determine which locations are performing best. This allows you to prioritize your ad budget by location.
2. Rate your ad against your landing page.
After reviewing your analysis, you may find that your PPC ads are not converted.
In this case, it’s time to review your ads and see if your landing page meets expectations.
For example, if an ad markets a “free CMS” but your landing page is targeted for inbound marketing certification, the connection will be disconnected.
To avoid this, make sure your headings and copy of your ad match the landing page to which you are linking.
3. Use ad extensions.
Ad extensions are one of the few ways to make your ad stand out.
With ad extensions, you can add additional information to your ad essentially at no additional cost. The information can be your phone number, additional site links, or even reviews.
If you haven’t set them up for your PPC campaigns, it may be time to consider how they can improve your ads.
4. Rate your keywords.
When choosing keywords for your PPC campaign, you should consider search volume, match type, and negative keywords.
Typically, the keywords you are targeting should have a high search volume.
Then you should consider the match type for your keywords. For example, if you’re using a broad match, you’d like to add negative keywords.
Using exact match and phrase match is more likely to get clicks and conversions, but may miss other options.
In general, it is a good idea to choose keywords with a high search volume and use a broad match. You should then change your negative keyword campaign to increase your conversion rate.
5. Measure your success with analytics.
If you want to review your PPC campaigns, you need to look at your analysis.
These analyzes show you which campaigns were successful and which were not. If a campaign was unsuccessful, you can fix errors and find out why.
Now you may be wondering “What PPC metrics should I look at?”
Below, let’s review five metrics that will get you the best for your money.
PPC metrics
If you have a limited time, these five metrics will give you a good overview of your performance. I’m not saying that you should ignore all other available metrics, but tracking these five over time provides a solid measure of your success.
1. Quality Score
Quality Score is Google’s measure of your keyword’s relevance, ensuring that searchers see relevant ads and have a positive experience. Factors that determine your Quality Score include:
- The clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword and the corresponding ad
- The relevance of the keyword and the ad to the search query
- The relevance of the keyword to the ad group
- The clickthrough rate of the display URLs in the ad group
- The Quality of your landing page
It is important to maintain a good Quality Score as Google uses it to determine yours Ad rankings as well as how much you pay per click.
Even if you think you’ve spotted your ego and crossed your T when it comes to that Keyword research, Campaign structure and ad text optimization, as well as low average quality values indicate that you are missing part of the puzzle.
2. Click rate
I recently asked 17 PPC experts to tell me the top three PPC metrics They pay particular attention when analyzing their AdWords accounts. The click rate was the most common answer. The clickthrough rate is important for several reasons, including:
- This is one of the most important factors in determining your quality score
- Find out here whether your ads are relevant to searchers
Low clickthrough rates are a sign that either your keywords or your ad motif (or both) need to be improved.
3. Conversion rate
Another very popular answer in our PPC metric interview: The conversion rate indicates how many people who clicked on your ad performed the desired action on your landing page.
The conversion rate is as important as the click rate. You don’t want to pay for tons of clicks and traffic if none of these traffics are doing any meaningful action.
Strong conversion rates mean that the money you spend per click comes back to you as a profit (that’s what we call return on investment, people).
4. Cost per conversion
Joe Vivolo of KoMarketing Associates put it this way: “This is obviously the number that makes or breaks a campaign from the point of view of success / failure.”
In other words, if you have to pay more to win a new customer than that customer is actually worth to your business, your campaign will fail. You have not earned a return on investment.
5. Wasted expenditure
Wasted spending is a measure of how much money you’re essentially pouring into the toilet by paying for clicks that aren’t converted. In other words, it’s an ROI killer.
The best way to reduce your wasted spending is to use negative keywords intelligently. Negative keywords can help you filter out traffic that is irrelevant to your business and is unlikely to convert.
By creating a negative keyword, you prevent your ads from showing on searches that contain that keyword. Bidding on non-converting keywords is a waste of your marketing budget.
Do you want to quickly check your performance for key metrics like this?
The AdWords Performance Grader is a free tool that instantly PPCs your AdWords account and compares your performance in areas such as Quality Score and wasteful spending against other advertisers in the same budget range.
This makes it easy for you to determine how you measure yourself against competitors and evaluate your campaigns to track changes (hopefully improvements) in your results over time.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in October 2011 and has been updated for completeness.
