If you were stranded on a deserted island and could only use 3 metrics to run your PPC campaign, what would they be? There’s so many Google Adwords metrics you can use to optimize! And although we hate to say ‘it depends’, it kinda does depending on your business offering, goals and your level of experience & sophistication of your campaigns.
But since we do hate to say ‘it depends’, we’re gonna put it on the line and go with these, that we think apply to us and most folks:
- Click-through rate (CTR%). This is the number of people that clicked on your ad, divided by the number of impressions, or times that ad was shown. Why is it on the list? It gives you a good gauge of the effectiveness of your ad copy & the keywords you are bidding on.
- Cost per Conversion. First, you need to define a conversion, it could be a lead or a sale or someone downloading a piece of content. This is taking CTR (above) a big step further, meaning it’s one thing to get someone to click your ad and visit your website or landing page, but the rubber hits the road when you assign a goal and measure against that. So assign an acceptable amount you are willing to pay for a lead, a sale, a demo request or a content download and measure, optimize and measure again! If you don’t have a goal yet, and are just driving basic traffic, use ‘Cost Per Click’ as a metric.
- Conversion Rate – Using this metric, you can determine the effectiveness of your landing pages. If you are getting a ton of clicks but have a really low conversion rate, then you know it’s time to update your landing pages.
Manage your Adwords KPI’s over time to affect your cost per customer!
Now, we can hear a lot of folks asking “What, you don’t look at overall cost? Are you mad?!” Of course you have to set your budgets and control costs, both on the low and high side. We don’t want to see anyone go broke! But that’s handled pretty well in the campaign set-up stage.
So what do you think of the list above? What would you look at instead?