When it comes to Pay-Per-Click marketing, advertisers are inundated with an endless list of metrics to track and measure. That’s because, unlike other traditional methods of advertising, PPC offers some fantastic ways to keep tabs on every aspect of a campaign. There is no denying the fact that PPC ad campaigns are data-driven to the max.
This also makes it easy for marketers to lose themselves in all the clicks, impressions, and other rates that may or may not make a real difference to the bottom line. After all, not all metrics are equal.
This begs the question: which figures are the most important to monitor?
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer because the most critical metrics vary according to the goals of a PPC campaign. Still, there are a few KPIs that are fundamental for the success of every campaign.
Here are the top metrics and KPIs to monitor:
The number of conversions resulting from a campaign is almost always the first priority of an advertiser unless their objective is only brand awareness. Ultimately, profits start with conversion, so it’s the number one priority of any business.
To measure the conversion rate, divide a campaign’s conversions by its total clicks.
For instance, a campaign with fifty clicks and five conversions will give a conversion rate of 10% when expressed as a percentage. Even though conversions are significant for campaign managers, they sometimes create campaigns optimized for clicks instead.
A click is the starting point of any conversion, making it a preliminary success indicator of a PPC campaign. It takes into account the number of people who clicked on your ad.
These clicks help campaign managers tweak their approach from time to time, even during a campaign’s running time. They can check on ads’ clicks throughout to see which are performing well to put more bids on them and pause those ads completely that are not faring well.
For mid-month performance measurements, clicks are a handy KPI, but of course, you cannot rely on just clicks to determine a campaign’s success.
Similar to how your clicks generated in a campaign measure its performance, CTR plays a vital role in determining the success of a campaign’s performance.
It is measured by the division of the total number of clicks generated by your campaign in a particular period from the total impressions. So, for instance, if your ad got 150 clicks and the total impressions were 1,000, then your CTR is 15% in that case.
It is essential to understand that a perfect CTR does not exist because industry types and other variables affect the PPC performance.
According to 2018 research, the differences in the average CTR of the auto industry and the dating and personals industry were 4% and 6.05%, respectively. So, suppose campaign managers rely entirely on these numbers as a benchmark for their CTR success. In that case, they will overlook the analysis of other variables that affect their campaigns differently.
When you compare CTR from other similar campaigns, they provide a good benchmark for improving upon.
One of the most difficult KPIs to measure is the Quality Score. Created by Google, this metric aims to point out your ad content’s relevancy with the help of CTR metric and more performance variables such as landing page experience.
However, it is difficult for advertisers to understand this metric because it is not as straightforward to measure as other KPIs such as clicks.
Google can evaluate an ad’s quality score with the help of expected CTR, ad format, ad relevance, and landing page experience.
When it comes to measuring the Quality Score, Google is upfront about its process and importance. In 2017, Google improved on how it reported Quality Score in Google ads, though the following aspects need to be kept in mind:
If you pay less money to Google Ads for campaigns, you will get a good Quality Score ranging between 7 and 10. However, if you pay more for ads, you will get a bad score of 6 or lower.
With a change in the Quality Score reports, advertisers found it easier to use it in Google Ads along with the provision of KPI’s historical data. Such insights are precious for advertisers to come up with better campaign decisions.
Advertisers are always highly interested in how they can improve the Quality Score as a means to determine the cost they pay for every click.
Additionally, Quality Score can influence KPIs like CPA and CPC.
PPC advertisers usually have a set budget that guides them on how to spend on an ad campaign. However, the bid and budget they specify for a PPC campaign are not guaranteed amounts that they will end up paying.
Advertisers place a higher bid than their competitors to get ad positions but pay a bid price second to it. As a result, your competitors in a PPC auction determine the cost of the ad you put up and the clicks it generates.
If you want to know the exact amount an advertiser pays for a campaign, calculate the CPC. Divide a campaign’s total cost by the number of clicks that ad generated.
To manually calculate your campaign’s cost, multiply a campaign’s clicks with the CPC.
In addition, you should think about methods for reducing your cost per click.
For advertising campaigns, you can come up with a cost per acquisition (CPA) which is the cost of acquiring a new customer. You can determine the CPA when you divide the total conversion costs by the total conversions.
Sometimes advertisers also opt for a bidding technique for a campaign to use a targeted CPA. This helps them use a CPA according to their budget with an automatic bid setting to get maximum conversions.
It is essential to have conversion tracking, know various bidding strategies and have a minimum of thirty to fifty conversions within the past 30 days of using a targeted CPA.
We all know impressions matter a lot where ads are concerned, and it doesn’t include them clicking on it. So the number of impressions for a campaign won’t indicate its success because there is no way to tell your ad’s effectiveness on your audience.
However, with the help of impression share, you can determine the number of impressions your campaigns generate. It is calculated when you divide your campaign’s total impressions by the impressions it was eligible to have.
If you want indirect yet competitive insight, impression share is a key metric you should have an eye on. For instance, if your impression share is 50% for some keyword, you can determine that the rest of the 50% is with your competitors.
You can reduce your competitors’ ad display by increasing your impression share. On the other hand, you’ll have to improve your bids to improve their impression share.
Whether search results for a query are paid or organic, Google has a way to balance them both. Google and Bing ads are displayed on top of the results page. The first one is at the highest position, the next one underneath that, and so on.
Advertisers determine the usual position of their ads with its average position. It is important to understand that Google doesn’t always place the highest bidders’ ads in the first place, for which they use the ad rank to figure out the average position.
You can find out the ad rank when you multiply Quality Score with the maximum CPM of an advertiser. However, this is an average, so even after calculations, you can’t tell your ad’s exact position.
It is natural to aim for the first position, but this is just to satisfy numbers because it doesn’t guarantee results.
It is also possible for some advertisers to get more conversions while in the fourth position than the first one. Hence, the average position should only be used as a point of reference but not as a target indicator as it doesn’t necessarily give the information you want.
In addition, it will also benefit to look at how Google Ads extensions perform relative to the normal listings in your campaign.
More often than not, paid marketers have a monthly budget they need to follow for an ad campaign. To what extent they achieve the budget they were given is determined by the budget attainment.
However, many PPC marketers don’t measure their PPC performance based on budget attainment, even if it provides a lot of information regarding their campaign’s management.
It is not easy to bid regularly and optimize results when PPC auction variations require continuous oversight. This is why marketers end up overspending or underspending on their budget frequently.
Nonetheless, PPC marketers should consider budget attainment as a valuable KPI.
A highly significant indicator of a PPC marketers’ skills and account health is the Lifetime Value (LTV). However, it is slightly complex to calculate a paid searches’ CLV.
When companies acquire customers through paid search and retain them for a longer time, they make more revenue.
LTV can be measured in several ways, even though it evaluates a customer’s lifetime with a business’s product. For instance, a large company such as Target will have a complicated LTV due to several aspects to it like customer retention rate, applied discounts, customer lifespan, etc.
PPC marketers generally avoid such calculations, but this KPI’s measurement could be precious for other departments.
There are many KPIs that you can use, and you might be tempted to use all of them. It is essential to understand your campaign and carefully choose metrics that suit it best so you can optimize them and get better results.
Chances are that your goal is to bring more traffic to your website, increase sales and enhance brand awareness through various campaigns. Understand what works for your campaign and what doesn’t, based on the KPIs you track.
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When you want to use paid search marketing platforms, Google Ads often leads the list. Because of its versatility, simplicity, and popularity, it’s obvious why it’s a popular choice. But when you drop all of your PPC advertising money into one marketing strategy, you could lose some leads.
That’s why some businesses explore paid advertising marketing outside of Google, with many turning to Linkedin Ads.
Google Ads and Linkedin Ads are highly efficient ways to market your products and services to businesses and consumers. But each marketing channel has its advantages and disadvantages. Whatever you choose, make sure you discuss the matter with your web development company.
Below is a closer look at each option.
We think it’s reasonable to conclude that Google reaches a vast audience worldwide – its ad reach is a stunning 4 billion people. Google search handles about 70% of desktop searches, and many companies report that they get about 90% of their organic traffic from the search engines. Also, up to 95% of the mobile search market comes from Google.
People use Google’s search a lot, and having the ability to target search terms with specific search ads is a massive benefit of Adwords. People tend to search for very specific things in Google, so if you can customize your Google advertising for your targeted audience, you’ll receive plenty of leads.
So, we can assume that most people’s targeted audience uses Google to some degree. That’s a massive advantage for companies when they want to target an audience.
However, businesses that want to narrow down their search may have issues getting their Google ads settings right with both Google Ads. And if you blunder when segmenting your audiences, your digital ad campaign could suffer.
LinkedIn features a narrower audience – 500 million users – namely businesses and business professionals. But this more limited audience makes it the perfect place for effective B2B marketing. LinkedIn lets marketers serve online ads to decision-makers and vital audience members in several ways.
Summary: For B2B firms that want to reach decision-makers, Linkedin is a terrific advertising platforms. If your B2C company intends to increase its reach, Google Ads could be the best fit.
When you target your audience with Google Ads, you have a few options: location, affinity, technology, buyer behavior, demographics, and interactions with your app or website.
No matter how much you know about your buyer, you may struggle to avoid clicks from worthless leads that cost too much.
In some cases on Google, people may not even know what they’re looking for. You can try to advertise to your desired targeted audience on Google Ads, but it can be challenging to get to the precise people who will most likely buy what you sell.
When people sign up for LinkedIn, they usually provide many details, such as their occupation, title/job title, experience, industry, education, interests, and more. All of this information can be leveraged for great advantage when you start your marketing campaigns.
Also, LinkedIn users can join many groups, start conversations, and obtain followers. The data is priceless when you want to target a specific audience and market to them. LinkedIn also has a Matched Audience that helps advertisers match their email marketing lists and website visitors with users on LinkedIn.
Many marketing experts think that LinkedIn Ads offer more value. LinkedIn has refined targeting, and you can make your product known to them so that you can tell them about something they didn’t know existed.
Summary: For B2B and B2C companies looking for a broad audience, Google Ads has enough targeting features. But for B2B firms that want to target specific groups, LinkedIn Ads has about 100 segmentation methods for micro targeting.
When you want lead generation, Google Ads has a broader reach and is the most effective. First, you can bring in a lot of prospects to your site without breaking the bank. The audience you’re after on Google visits the search giant with the idea to find the best product or service. This makes generating leads easier.
Getting leads from LinkedIn can be more challenging. Users of the platform may sign in to read industry news or talk to group members. No matter how perfect your ad is, viewers may not be in the mood to buy anything.
That said, Linkedin has a way to target ad leads through in-site messaging, which can generate plenty of leads.
When it comes down to dollars and cents, LinkedIn Ads usually are more pricey than Google Ads. As in Google, you can select cost-per-click or cost-per-impression.
LinkedIn also features a cost-per-send for InMail advertising. Typically, you’ll pay about $5 for each click, $6 for 1,000 impressions, and .80 for each send.
With Google Ads, the average CPC is $1. But to leverage that low cost, you need to work on your audience segmentation. If you don’t your ROI may be below what you want.
Summary: Advertising budgets for each platform depends on several factors. On average, Google Ads cost less than LinkedIn Ads. If your B2B company has a tight budget, you may want to focus on a limited variety of LinkedIn ads instead of a broad range of Google Ads.
So should you advertise with Google Ads vs LinkedIn Ads? Yes!
What we mean is, it depends. The correct choice depends on your budget, product or service offered, marketing goals, and target audience. You should not assume that when you need a digital marketing campaign, Google Analytics Adwords is the only choice.
It’s critical to evaluate the market, understand who your buyer is, and make a data-driven decision about the best marketing platform to reach your well-defined goals. One type of company might do better with Google Ads, and another may find LinkedIn Ads preferable.
The great news is you don’t need to choose between the two platforms. Many businesses use both, as well as Facebook, Instagram, and others. If you have the budget, it may pay off to diversify your paid search advertising to get the best ROI.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Digital marketing is a classic marketing strategy that’s commonly used to supplement organic web traffic, but it’s hardly the most straightforward way to increase your site’s audience. In fact, from a technological perspective, it’s a rather fussy practice. That’s why brands that want to include a PPC marketing strategy in their overall strategic decisions need to work with an experienced agency. Agencies facilitate ad distribution, track clicks, and calculate fees – and the best ones can help their clients thrive. Unfortunately, there are a lot of subpar agencies and bad actors out there, and you need to know how to spot them.
So, how do you know if it’s time to fire your PPC agencies? Keep an eye out for these 9 red flags. They could indicate you’re working with the wrong agency and that it’s time to make a move.
Companies leave their PPC agencies behind for all sorts of reasons, but according to a 2015 report by the Society for Digital Agencies (SoDA), the most common reasons include outgrowing the agency’s capabilities, cost overruns, and dissatisfaction with their strategy. These are all valid reasons, and ultimately many of them can be reduced to an agency’s failure to generate any or enough growth. After all, disliking the agency’s strategy isn’t likely to be much of a problem if that strategy is generating major growth. Similarly, a brand is unlikely to view itself as having outgrown the agency is their accounts continue to grow.
Ultimately, what these different reasons for firing PPC agencies demonstrate is that, any way you slice it, no one wants to work with an agency that isn’t making them money. So, while it might take a little while for your PPC ads to gain traction, if you’re not seeing growth based on the launch of or changes to your PPC campaign, it’s time to move on to a different agency.
While most brands work with a PPC advertising agency to run their campaigns, it’s not only possible but advisable for you to set up your own accounts with the major PPC advertising platforms, which include sites like Google AdWords, Yahoo, and Facebook. Still, if you’re not the most technologically savvy, it can be tempting to let your agency do it for you. Don’t give in to the impulse. Instead, ask them to guide you through it so that you can ensure that you’re the one with owner access rights.
Unless you have the owner access rights to your company’s PPC accounts, you can’t be sure you have unmediated access to your campaign metrics or feel good/ confident that you’ll be able to transfer your accounts to another agency or bring them in-house if needed. In other words, your agency could be misrepresenting best results to you or could refuse to relinquish control if you end your contract. You need to retain those rights and then give your PPC agent the appropriate permissions to manage your campaigns. If they balk at this arrangement, show them the door.
Typically, when you look at your company’s profile on a site like Google AdWords, you’ll see that your PPC agency has set up specific goals to help your business grow. These commonly include such metrics as Cost Per Acquisition, Return On Advertising Spend, and Cost Per Lead, though there are plenty of other valuable metrics that are worth tracking. Such measurements assure you that you’re spending your Digital marketing money in the right place, help you budget for ad spending, and offer insights into what’s working and what isn’t.
Unfortunately, you’ll occasionally encounter PPC advertising agencies that fail to set up these metric reports, and they’re not to be trusted. Even if they claim to be using an in-house system, it’s your right to demand they use the standard reporting system for each PPC platform and to fire them if they refuse to. Dashboard-based metrics exist to provide consistent measurements regarding the success of PPC campaigns ad those are the numbers you want to reference.
In a similar vein, some PPC advertising agencies skip the core metrics noted above in favor of less valuable but more appealing “vanity metrics.” Vanity metrics don’t help your business make money and they offer limited insight into your operations. Examples of vanity metrics include any campaign value based on impressions, engagement metrics that don’t drive conversions, and even many of the behavior-based metrics that used to be considered the gold standard in website evaluation, such as bounce rate or time on site.
Ultimately, vanity metrics don’t serve your company because they can be created artificially. An untrustworthy PPC agency might drive up engagement numbers by sharing a great meme on your brand’s landing pages, which will drive likes and other reactions, but won’t actually funnel clients to your site or create sales. Similarly, you can get a huge number of impressions by getting your PPC new ads onto a very popular site, but if no one is clicking on it, all you’ve got is a tally of how many people visited/ web traffic to someone else’s website.
Having the right metrics is important, but if you’re going to meet your goals then your Good PPC agency needs to be adjusting your account settings regularly to refine your campaigns. At a minimum, that means accessing your account to regularly monitoring and fine-tune the settings at least once a week. Such regular check-ins allow your agency to quickly adjust your social media campaigns based on updates to the search engines algorithm, catch any conversion mistakes that could cost your company money, and even react to competitors campaigns.
Be sure that you not only ask your PPC agency how often they access and update your accounts, but that you’re also checking your accounts regularly for updates. The reality is that, although many companies run PPC campaigns, only 10% of AdWords accounts are updated weekly. If your PPC agency can’t meet that standard, ditch them for one that will stay on top of your campaigns.
Just as your PPC agency needs to be fine tuning your accounts regularly, they should also be reporting back on your campaigns at least monthly. While seeing week-to-week progress would be great, as with many kinds of growth, this can be hard to evaluate. Comprehensive, monthly reports, on the other hand, can help you see what your agency has been doing on your behalf, how your accounts are growing, and allow you to be an active participant in your Digital marketing strategy.
Never settle for a company that doesn’t offer substantive reporting. While great reports may offer added insights from your account manager or more labor intensive explanatory work, the majority of PPC reporting is automated – any company that doesn’t provide it is just lazy.
It’s unrealistic to expect that you’ll speak to the same person every time you contact your PPC agency; that doesn’t even happen at your bank or your doctor’s office. That being said, there should be one person who acts as the lead on your account because that allows them to master your brand’s voice, develop a big picture strategy, and generally build up a knowledge base around your brand’s needs and preferences. They might be busy or out of the office occasionally, but anyone whose experienced both approaches – a core account manager and a rotating cast of agents – can tell you that having a point person makes a difference.
If your PPC agency doesn’t have you working with a single, core agent, you may want to ask a few questions to get a better sense of what’s happening. Do they have an unusual in-house strategy, or are they having trouble with employee retention? Do they think it doesn’t make a difference? You can also request that they place you with a single representative, but if that’s not their standard practice already, you’re probably better off going elsewhere. It just doesn’t bode well.
Google AdWords isn’t a new program and there are plenty of other PPC programs out there, but if an agency is committed to this work, then they should have complete Google’s AdWords certification program. You can check on this by asking them to show you their Premier Partner page – it really is that simple. Not having one isn’t necessarily the worst offense a company can commit, but it’s a good indicator that you can do better and should commit your ads spend elsewhere.
Did you pick your PPC agency based on their portfolio of appealing PPC ads/ads or optimized images? That’s a great starting point – it certainly indicates that they can do high-quality work – but it’s not enough if they’re not actually showing you your brand’s own ads before they launch them. Obvious, right? It should be, but many entrepreneurs have been duped by PPC agencies who tell them that their ad is similar to another ad product, which is called ad copy; the client, not wanting to be pushy, walks away with their own notion of their brand’s ad, and meanwhile the agency may not have done any work at all.
Your PPC agency should be giving you the final say on all your paid ads, so if you’ve supposedly got a campaign running and you haven’t seen your ads, ask to see them right away. Odds are good that if your agency isn’t showing you your PPC ads before launching them that they either don’t exist or they’re extremely low quality for online visibility. Great PPC agencies are proud of their work and they want you to see it. Anything less should raise concerns.
Hiring an agency to manage your PPC campaigns will obviously cost more than just the fees for the campaign itself, but the costs involved in running ads with your agency shouldn’t be confusing. That’s because, ultimately, your money should only be going two different places – to the agency and to the ad platform – and everyone at the company should be clear on the split. So, when we say you should be wary about confusing fees, we’re not talking about total cost (that’s a matter for you and your budget), but rather about how the money is split up. For any payment there should be the fee to the agency and the ads spend and it should always be obvious what the division is there.
As popular as PPC marketing is with businesses today, many of the agencies that execute these campaigns don’t do a very good job. They’re wasting your ad spend and your time, and you deserve better. That’s why you should switch to PPC.co’s PPC Management Service.
At PPC.co, we’re committed to ensuring that your ads are reaching the right audience and we know that most agencies just don’t deliver that. Starting from our understanding that website conversions often top out at 2%, we emphasize PPC marketing that pairs first contacts with retargeting efforts to ensure that your brand remains a top-of-mind solution for past visitors. A non-converting visitor is often just someone who hasn’t seen the right content yet, and we want to help you make those connections.
What else makes our PPC Management program stand out? With dual Google Ads and Google Analytics certifications, we have a deep understanding of the systems & AdWords account that get your ads seen and can use tracking data to its fullest potential of web traffic. In fact, that’s why we start every client engagement with a full PPC audit, because even when we’re not leading the campaigns, our skilled professionals can quickly see what’s working and what’s falling short in your current campaigns. From the start, we put our expertise to work for you.
If your PPC agency has exhibited any of the above warning signs, you can’t afford to wait around for progress. It’s time for the protection of business and moves on – to PPC.co. Contact us today to learn more about our PPC Management Services and say goodbye to wasted ad spend and rock bottom conversions. Once you’ve seen the difference a top PPC agency can make in your campaigns, you’ll never believe you let anyone else handle your PPC needs.
