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A wide array of metrics measure the success and performance of your Google Ads account.
Over 20 unique metrics populate your Google Ads dashboard, but not all of these figures carry the same weight.
In other words, some metrics matter more than others.
This discussion will focus on the 5 top performance metrics examples that you absolutely cannot ignore. No matter what your marketing goal is, these metrics are a top priority:
We’ll also look at the challenges of tracking your performance metrics and how PPC Signal, an automated software tool for PPC data analysis, can help you better manage these metrics.
In this guide, we’ll cover the following:
Let’s get started!
In sports, a player’s stats help teams and fans see how well that individual is performing. If you look at the back of any sports trading card, you see a complete breakdown of a player’s stats.
Performance metrics in Google Ads are essentially the stats that tell you how well your PPC campaigns are performing.
If your campaigns had trading cards, you could flip one over and see every performance metric for that particular strategy, including the impressions, impression share, clicks, conversions, and costs per conversion.
That said, there is a substantial difference between a typical Google Ads metric and a performance metric example.
Every business has its own goals and objectives, meaning each company has its understanding of what KPIs are essential.
KPIs stand for “key performance indicator.” These are the metrics that directly link to your marketing objectives.
Like sports, marketing happens in phases. Several actions have to fall into place before a “goal” can happen.
In marketing, you have the beginning phases involving brand awareness. Then, you move into the research and consideration phases. Finally, there is the action or conversion phase.
The 5 best performance metric examples to encompass these various phases are:
This article will discuss each of these 5 types of performance metrics in detail and how you can track them with the PPC Signal system.
There are 5 main types of performance metrics that you should not ignore. This section will detail each one. Later, we’ll see how PPC Signal can help you stay on top of them.
The first gateway to PPC performance is impressions. Impressions are how many times people have the chance to see your search ads.
You can equate it to ad views, but there is no guarantee that Google search users actually “see’ your ad.
Because most paid/sponsored results appear at the top of the Google search results page, many users have become accustomed to scrolling past these messages to organic results.
However, that doesn’t discount the effectiveness of Google Ads. It adds to it.
When people click on an ad result, it’s because they want to convert, meaning ad traffic is typically more valuable than organic sources.
Moreover, even if someone doesn’t click your ad, the message may have done its job. Impressions mean brand awareness. Your PPC ad has appeared in front of someone in your target audience.
Impressions are crucial to track because this is the first step toward clicks, conversions, and other performance indicators.
Your ad won’t appear on every search result page of the keywords you target. There will be times that you are outranked, outbid, or don’t have enough room in your budget to afford the click.
Impression share shows you how often your ad does appear versus the times it could have appeared, but didn’t.
Impression share is expressed by a percentage, like the batting average of a baseball player. It is calculated by taking your impressions and dividing them by the number of total impressions your ad was eligible for.
Impression Share = Total Earned Impressions
The higher your impression share, the more exposure your ad is getting. It can also indicate how much competition there is for the search term.
If you’re seeing low impression shares, a likely cause is a competitor has heavily invested in that particular keyword.
Remember, more exposure doesn’t automatically mean more clicks. You need to make sure the target keywords are relevant and generate more than just impressions.
Understanding what your impression share means will help you see what areas in your campaign you need to focus on.
Every impression is an opportunity to get a click. A higher impression share means more chances to encourage search users to potentially visit your website.
Don’t just approach impression share as the percentage of impressions you’re earning. Also, think of it as the impressions you aren’t receiving.
For instance, if you have an impression share of 60%, there is an opportunity to acquire that remaining 40%.
Thus, impression share is a great performance metric to show you where an opportunity exists to improve your campaigns.
Clicks occur whenever a prospective customer clicks your ad in the search results.
When a search user clicks your ad, they arrive at your website. So, you can also think of clicks as paid site traffic.
Clicks seem like a straightforward metric. However, there is plenty to consider. This is the turning point in PPC marketing.
You pay for every click your search ads receive. Thus, this performance metric example is crucial to watch because not only does it measure how effective your ad is (more clicks = compelling ad copy), but clicks also influence your costs directly.
You should pay extremely close attention to inconsistencies in your click data. If clicks are down, it could signify that your ad copy is failing or competitors are creating more appealing ads.
Since clicks relate to costs, an increase in this metric is also worth noting because your budget may be depleting faster than you’re used to.
Clicks are a great factor in evaluating the performance of your ads. How high or low your clicks indicates what parts of your Google Ads account are working or not.
Trends and shifts in your click data will reveal potential opportunities in your account, as well as possible risks. You want to use these insights to determine how to spend your marketing budget.
After impressions, clicks are the next step in the process. You can’t be a successful PPC marketer without paying attention to this performance metric example.
The next type of performance metric to pay extremely close attention to is conversions.
A conversion tells you if someone who clicked on your ad took action on your site. Or, did they just click away from the page?
This action could be making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, downloading a tool or eBook, etc. Any action that your business receives value from could be deemed a conversion activity.
The value of these actions will determine the returns of your clicks.
At this stage in the ad process, you’ve paid for the click. If you’re unable to turn that click into conversion, you’re likely wasting valuable and possibly limited ad dollars.
If your ad drew your customers in to click, but they didn’t travel further into your website or take any action, it’s problematic. It may be time to overhaul your landing pages.
You have to figure out what works for your business and its customers. What information, offers, and other details on your landing page drive conversions, and which ones do not?
This is the final gateway in the ad process. You have to know the best ways to encourage your ad traffic to take that valuable conversion action.
To do this, you have to track your conversions constantly.
The final performance metric example to keep on your watch list is your cost per conversion. This measure compares how much you’ve spent versus the conversions you’ve gained.
If you paid $100 for 5 conversions, then your cost per conversion is $20.
Knowing how much you spend for each conversion allows you to measure the efficiency of your advertising strategies.
The lower your cost per conversion, the more room there is for profits. Thus, it is a crucial metric to study.
In the quest to make Google Ads management easier, many marketers look for shortcuts and easy ways to track performance, such as focusing only on a handful of metrics.
This is where the concept of key performance metrics comes from, but it can be a misleading term.
While the 5 performance metrics example above (impressions, impression share, clicks, conversions, and cost per conversion) closely align with your advertising objectives, they don’t show the whole picture.
In many ways, they are just the beginning. Consider your clicks, for example. Knowing how many clicks you receive has some value, but you need to incorporate other metrics to gain vital context behind those clicks.
If you only look at your clicks, you fail to identify the people behind those activities, when they are active, which devices or operating systems they prefer, and much more.
The same is true of any of the examples of performance metrics listed above. You have to look at your impressions, clicks, conversions, etc., from multiple angles.
As you do, you’ll identify patterns in PPC data, correlations, and other interesting insights that help you intimately understand the inner workings of your ad strategies and how to improve them.
Essentially, these extra metrics help you troubleshoot why your performance metrics are changing, for better or worse.
Here are some additional types of performance metrics to pay keen attention to:
All of your performance metrics are in a constant state of change. Every time your ad appears, your metrics change.
As discussed, it’s vital to the performance and success of your Google Ads strategies to stay on top of these fluctuations as much as possible.
The more you track the types of performance metrics you’ve deemed significant, the easier it is to discover trends, opportunities, anomalies, potential issues, and other crucial events.
However, the constant changes paired with the overall size and complexity of your Google Ads data make this a challenging feat.
PPC Signal, arguably the best PPC optimization tool out there, aims to alleviate the struggle and overwhelming nature of managing a Google Ads account.
Through machine learning technology, PPC Signal can automatically detect, track, analyze, and present notable changes to your Google Ads metrics in a straightforward, user-friendly dashboard.
Let’s see how this dashboard and the PPC Signal system make it easy for you to stay on top of every performance metric example discussed earlier.
In the sample dashboard pictured above, there are only 21 active signals. That’s an incredibly manageable number and it only takes a few minutes to scan this list.
With a much larger Google Ads account, there may be hundreds of active signals at a time. That’s far less manageable.
If you want to find changes specific to your impressions, you need to filter out all other signals.
To do this, you’ll use the filtering options along the left side.
Specifically, you’ll need to use the Metrics filter. This will allow you to select Impressions and remove any signal from the active roster that doesn’t involve this performance metric example.
This will leave only impression-based PPC marketing insights.
You can select any signal and tap Explore to open it. This will expand your view of the data and allow you to interact with it in new ways.
Two features on this page are extremely valuable. The first is the interactive trendline chart. Not only can you zoom in and out of the data, but you can also add additional metrics to the chart.
This enables you to see how a change to your impressions might influence your clicks, conversions and other performance metrics examples.
The second critical feature is the Take Action button. PPC Signal will recommend a follow-up activity that you can take to resolve this insight.
PPC Signal takes you from raw data to action in just a few clicks!
Let’s look at an impression share signal. We’ll follow the same process as before:
This will remove any signal that doesn’t include impression share from your active list. Finding and resolving risks and opportunities affecting this performance metric example is much easier.
Applying additional filters will help you further remove irrelevant insights to zero in on the changes that matter most to you. You can interact with your signals any way you choose with the wide range of filter options.
For instance, you can filter by a particular campaign or device type. Alternatively, you can elect to focus on resolving risks first, before taking on opportunities.
After you find a noteworthy impression share signal, you can tap Explore to open the data and take a closer look inside.
We’ve already discussed the interactive chart feature and the Take Action button. You can also view the data as a table and export it to use elsewhere.
The significance of clicks makes them a vital type of performance metric to track using the PPC Signal system.
Filtering for clicks follows the same procedure as before. The only difference is that clicks are a middle funnel metric, whereas impressions and impression share are top funnel ones.
You’ll notice in the screenshot that there are two anomaly signals active for clicks. Anomalies are tricky to detect and track in PPC marketing because they directly go against what’s expected.
This type of signal is valuable for several reasons. Not only is it showing you a change that would be difficult to detect through manual analysis alone, but it is also an insight that involves two types of performance metrics.
You can investigate any detected anomaly further by using the Explore button. From there, you can interact with the data, make changes, and export the insight to use elsewhere and more.
Looking at conversion signals can help you optimize the final step in the PPC marketing process.
When you filter by the conversion metric type, which is under the bottom funnel heading, you’ll distill your active signals down to only include these types of changes.
Tracking increases and decreases in conversions can be a great way to identify landing pages that are doing their job versus ones that may need to be revisited.
Similar to clicks, you may also come across anomalies in your conversions. These might occur because your conversions are increasing, but you’re failing to control on cost per conversion. You can click on the explore button to further see the signal detail.
The final performance metric example we’ll explore with the PPC Signal system is the cost per conversion. As mentioned, this helps you put dollars and cents behind how much each conversion costs.
Discovering significant changes to your cost per conversion is especially useful for locating areas of wasted spending. Take the following insight, for example:
If you see the left side signal although it’s not an anomaly still it gives you good information that highlights that your budget is being drained for no reason.
Cost per conversion has skyrocketed over the last 5 days. It was $83.3 but now it has reached $306.5.
That’s a substantial increase (267.9.9%) that you don’t want to ignore. Tomorrow, it could be even higher!
The same goes for the right side signal which is typically telling about anomaly. If the cost per conversion is increasing in the same way then in the end you will have lots of conversions but eventually, you will be at a loss because you have paid a lot for your conversion cost.
PPC Signal allows you to detect these problems early, so you can avoid continuing to waste your ad budget.
It also has benefits for positive trends and shifts. Since PPC marketing is so competitive, you want to be the first account manager to detect keywords increasing in popularity or areas where costs are going down.
Once upon a time, we used the Yellow Pages to find new businesses and encyclopedias to answer our most pressing questions. Today, we use search engines, mainly Google. This is why SEO has become a must for businesses.
Google Ads is an effective way to pay to be the top result for searches that pertain to your business, making it an excellent way to increase your website traffic and generate new leads and customers.
The shorter answer: yes, Google Ads are effective. How effective will depend on your abilities as an advertiser.
Performance metrics in digital marketing include things like impressions, clicks, bounce rates, conversions, and more.
Like the stats on the back of a player’s baseball card, performance metrics in digital marketing help you measure how well your strategies are performing and in which areas.
By studying your metrics and tracking drops and spikes in each, you can uncover risks, opportunities, and other occurrences, giving you plenty of time to react appropriately.
Reaching and maintaining a good status in your metrics requires almost constant effort and attention. If you see a sudden decline in your click metrics, you need to find out why and act quickly to correct it.
Your metrics will always be changing, whether good or bad. Your job as a marketer is to ensure that your metrics are improving more than they are declining.
With so many types of performance metrics to track and obsess about in Google Ads, you need a tool like PPC Signal.
Not only will PPC Signal track the 5 performance metrics examples that are most important for PPC advertising – impressions, impression share, clicks, conversions, and cost per conversion – but you can also detect changes for any other metric.
You can even directly track your costs and wasted spending to optimize your Google Ads budget further!
PPC Signal’s system is straightforward, intuitive, and highly effective. If you’re struggling to keep up with the ever-changing nature of your performance metrics, this is your answer.
All you have to do is filter which types of performance metrics you want to target, select an insight, resolve it, and repeat.
You can consistently make improvements to your Google Ads marketing campaigns’ effectiveness in just a few clicks.
Without PPC Signal, you could spend hours finding significant changes in your account and even more time deciding how to act.
With PPC Signal, it’s as easy as opening the tool and selecting which insight you want to explore.
PPC Signal is PPC simple.
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