PPC KPIs - How to measure the success of your Google ads campaigns? • Digital Dot

PPC KPIs – How to measure the success of your Google ads campaigns?

Pay Per Click (PPC) is a fundamental digital marketing approach for companies looking to advertise instantly. However, much like all other advanced digital marketing solutions, it can only do so much without professional guidance. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a team to handle your Google Ads campaigns. Why? Because not only is there a process to doing the research, planning, and maintaining the advertising process, but there is also the matter of measuring the success of your paid ads. With our PPC agency NYC, you can not only get optimal paid ads solutions, but you can also learn how to monitor them. In this article, we offer the most important PPC KPIs to keep an eye on.

Vector image of laptop with different metrics to illustrate PPC KPIs that one needs to monitor.
Learn how to improve your Google Ads campaigns by exploring how to measure their success.

Six PPC KPIs that measure the success of your Google Ads campaigns

As you invest more time and resources into advertising your business and growing your brand, you need to have a realistic image of where your efforts are leading you. Whether we’re discussing paid advertising campaigns or SEO strategies, monitoring the results is important. It helps you calculate the ROI and determine whether or not you are making the right call along the way. Having said that, here are the six fundamental PPC metrics to pay close attention to. There are others, of course, but there are the universal ones that apply to all industries:

#1: Click-through rate (CTR)

Click Through Rate (CTR) - one of the essential PPC KPIs

The point of your Google Ads campaigns is to get customers to click on the ad when they see it. Every time they do, it counts as a click and contributes to the overall success rate of your ads. Once you sum up all the clicks and compare them with the number of people that saw the ad, you get one of the most important PPC KPIs out there – the click-through rate (CTR).

  • Basically, you divide the number of people who click on your ad by the number of people who saw your ad and multiply that number by 100. That will give you an exact percentage of your CTR.

The higher your CTR is, the more successful your ad campaign is. You can use CTRs for separate ad campaigns to run a cross-comparison and identify how each keyword you choose is performing. Based on those results, you can determine whether or not you need to modify your approach.

#2: Conversion rate

Conversion Rate

Having someone click on your ad is only the first step of measuring the success of your Google Ads campaign. You still need to lead that person to a landing page that will convince them that you have what they are searching for. And it is on that landing page that you use a transparent Call to Action (CTA) to engage with the visitors and point them toward converting into customers. Based on the number of people that actually get from seeing your ad to converting into a customer, you get your PPC conversion rate.

Whether we’re discussing organic or paid traffic, it is the goal of each business to increase the conversion rate. How it fits into our story about PPC KPIs is a matter of using the conversion rate your ads are generating to determine the ROI on your PPC investments. The higher your conversion rate is, the more successful your Google Ads campaigns are.

#3: Cost per conversion

Three dice saying CPC - PPC KPIs

One of the benefits of Google Ads advertising is the amount of control it grants to those that apply it. You have the power to determine just how much you are willing to bid on each keyword that you are gunning for. And you can stop investing in campaigns at any time. Such decisions rest on the overall cost per conversion that your ads have.

  • The cost per conversion is a metric that shows the average amount of money that you spend on PPC for every conversion that you get.

Of course, the goal is for the cost per conversion to be as low as possible. However, not everyone will convert after clicking on your ad. And if you notice that the average cost per conversion is too high, then you have a clear indicator that your Google Ads campaigns are not as successful as they should be.

#4: Average position

Example of ads positioned on random web page - PPC KPIs

Much like with SEO, positioning plays a key role with PPC as well. The placement of your ads by Google can make or break your campaigns. And the best indicator of just how good that placement is would be the average position. The higher your average position is, the more likely it is to appear toward the bottom of ad listings. Therefore, it is in the best interest of your business to get as high an average position as possible in order to earn the most traffic, which will lead to the most clicks.

#5: Quality score

Arms holding out planks with number from 1-10 to signify quality score.

As is the case with all digital marketing efforts, answering the needs of your target audience is what matters most. This is what quality score represents as one of the essential PPC KPIs for measuring the performance of your Google Ads campaigns.

The content on your landing page needs to correspond with the keywords in your Google Ads campaign. Otherwise, your advertising efforts are perceived as misleading, which will earn you additional costs for maintaining ad positions for keywords. But if you deliver on what your ads show, not only will your quality score get higher, but you will also get a discount on your ad costs on the count of being defined as a reliable source of information for users.

  • Quality score is based on a scale of 1-10, where 5 is considered to be the average score. If you get a quality score of 10, you get a 50% discount in comparison to those that have a score of 5. And if your quality score amounts to 1, you pay 400% more based on the fact that your content has been judged as a poor source of information.

#6: Impressions

  • An “impression” marks each time your ad displays to your target audiences.

You can have the best ad campaign out there but it will do you no good if there is no one to see it. Although not a performance indicator for your ad campaign, impressions still matter. This is a reminder of just how many people see your ads on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. It is a great indicator that the time and effort you invest into each campaign does not go unnoticed.

Start perfecting your Google Ads campaigns and watch your PPC KPIs improve

Hand showing a rising arrow over a graph
Let our team here at Digital Dot help you monitor the most important PPC KPIs.

The entire field of PPC advertising is a complex and challenging aspect of digital marketing strategizing. It takes research, knowledge, and experience to secure PPC KPIs that will lead to the growth of your business. However, under the professional guidance of Digital Dot – digital marketing agency NYC, you can be in a much better position to not only measure the success of your Google Ads campaigns but also improve them over time.

Latest Posts