Internet traffic originating from pay-per-click advertisements bring approximately 50% more lead conversions than organic web traffic.
This is all good and well, but how do you, as the marketer, figure out if your Google Adwords is truly working for your business? From analyzing traffic to measuring conversion rates and many other factors.
So, do you want to decipher your Google AdWords report to find out how successful your marketing campaign has been? Pay attention to the metrics in this guide.
Setting the Stage
Google Ads, which before July 24, 2018, was known as Google AdWords, is essentially an online advertising platform on which advertisers pay to display advertisements, services, products and other content such as videos and applications.
Google Ads are driven by algorithms that interpret searches to display, as best as possible, relevant content to the end-user.
The digital advertising world has opened doors to marketers and advertisers to be able to leverage user searches and data to get much closer to matching advertising and promotional material with people who need and/or want it most.
Once You’re On the Stage
All good and well to say “Let’s get our stuff out there onto Google Ads, millions of people will come flocking”, the trick is to be able to understand the analytics and constantly change your campaigns to remain relevant. As such, it is important that you decide which analytics will drive your marketing decisions.
There are many ways to analyze your Google Ads efforts, not all as important as each other and each will influence changes, if necessary, to your campaigns.
Some keywords will take more time than others to materialize in the campaign or promotion you are running.
In fact, it is fundamental to the success of your Google Ads campaign to set out with the best keyword strategy you can, without a solid keyword plan any of the metrics must be considered, at best, as skewed.
Deciding how often to measure your Google Ad campaigns and promotions is key. It is a mistake to analyze in too small increments of time, just as it also wrong to measure over larger increments.
If you’re unsure on how to start building the right campaign, then look into Google Ads Services, they’re bound to assist you correctly from the beginning.
Building Your Google Adwords Report
From the ground up is the only way to build a successful Google Adwords report. Once you’ve read through the following metrics, you need to ensure that a section of your report is solely dedicated to crunching these numbers.
You’ll notice that certain metrics that go into this report will interflow from one to the other, often, they go hand in hand.
So without further ado, we give you your list of the 7 key metrics you should absolutely include in your report.
1. Impressions Matter
This analytic shows the number of times your Ad has been seen. It tells you how effectively the ad is placed, from a keyword perspective, and how often it shows up in searches.
This is the first and most important metric it tells you off-the-bat how effective your keyword planning has been.
Simply put, low impressions equal bad keywords.
2. Clicks Count
In the Google Ads context, it not only vital that your ads show up in searches, but it is also even more important than the user actually clicks on the hyperlink.
The intention of any Google Ads campaign is to trigger a call to action by the end-user. Simply measuring the number of times your campaign appears won’t be enough, you also need to know if the call to action is effective. A bit like having a billboard outside a department store but nobody actually goes into the store.
This metric will drive your discussions and decisions around the content in your campaign or promotion. The content must be relevant and compelling enough to invoke that valuable call to action from the targetted user.
3. Cost Is an Important Factor
Companies marketing budgets are becoming bigger and bigger as competition grows. It is important to track what you are spending on your Google campaigns, this analytic is the basis for the cost to click and cost to conversion calculations and is a key driver for making changes to the Google Ads material you have published.
It is not correct to say “the more I spend the better the return I will get”. It is extremely important to find the cost cut-off point, that point where the amount being spent simply cannot be justified anymore.
At some point, it may become obvious that regardless of the effectivity of the keyword strategy and the nature of the content, it is simply not working anymore.
4. Cost Per Click (CPC) Analysis
If we know the number of clicks and we know the cost of the campaign we can calculate CPC by dividing the cost of your clicks (or the amount you’ve spent on the campaign thus far) by the total number of clicks.
Cost per click is often referred to as pay per click, can be set with a period-based threshold, usually daily or weekly. Once the threshold is reached the ad will stop displaying in searches until the next period refreshes.
Setting up the cost per click requires you, the campaigner, to set a maximum value per click. If the campaign is successful you will, inevitably, be billed less. This is because the cost per click is the only metric that considers your competition and uses the formula Competitor Ad Rank/Your Quality Score + 0.1 = your Cost per click. This may seem complex but think of your quality score as dependant on various factors, which include:
- The relevance of each keyword to the ad group.
- Page quality and relevance.
- The quality of the campaign content.
- The campaign performance over time.
As with all the previous measures, using cost per click without considering the keyword strategy and clicks would be superfluous.
5. Conversion Rate Measurements
All too often conversions are expected to generate revenue, in truth, however, conversions are when any call to action that the campaign has suggested is completely carried out by the end-user. It may be a visit to a website, it may be to get the user to subscribe it might even be for affiliate marketing purposes.
Measuring conversions will also provide insight into where the user “drops out” of the campaign.
For example, did he click on the link and not subscribe?
Managing drop out is more important than most would think, it is the metric that takes the end-to-end view of the ad, campaign or promotion.
6. Cost Per Conversion
Cost per conversion is the measure of the total cost paid for an ad, campaign or promotion relative to their success in achieving the set objective. It is the ratio of impressions to the number of conversions.
Cost per conversion should not be confused with cost per click, which is also abbreviated CPC.
7. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
CTR has one vital function, it shows how effective the ad, campaign or promotion is at generating user engagement.
CTR is used to manage the movement of costs between campaigns, especially in the case where similar campaigns have been designed with the same intended outcome.
For example, the campaign maybe is trying to get a user to subscribe to a blog that writes of “How to Become a Blogger”. One campaign may use the approach to the user that leverages their desire to increase personal earnings, another campaign may focus on getting the user to investigate getting their work published. Both campaigns might take the user to a website to subscribe to “How to be a better writer”.
Putting it All Together
The metrics discussed are, and should not, be considered in isolation. They are inherently related.
But the foundation of a successful Google Ads campaign or promotion is based, for sure, on one thing – a great, strong, well-thought-out keyword strategy.
Going back to the beginning of this article, we remind you that your keywords are absolutely paramount to determining the ultimate success of your Google Adwords campaign, and should form a large part of your final report.
You may have different sections to your Google Adwords campaign, and it could be a good idea, particularly if your business has different divisions that have independent campaigns running, to report individually on each business division’s campaign as a standalone product.
If your business is one that offers construction, as well as restoration, you would usually run two separate campaigns for each service, and in turn, would report individually on each of these campaigns.
The reason for this?
One campaign may perform better than the other, and you’d want to see which parts of your strategy should change and adapt, as opposed to being forced to change the entire campaign as a result of an incomplete report.
Google Adwords Reporting Success
One thing we would like to remind you of is that Google Adwords campaigns take a few weeks if not months to truly perform to your standards. You don’t want to jump into Google Adwords reporting right away and be disappointed that you’re not receiving immediate results.
Stay with the journey and report periodically, so that you’re aware when changes need to be made.
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