The Only PPC Campaign Performance Report You Need

Pay-per-click advertising is a fickle beast to tame. It’s not an overnight job. Marketers must be prepared to invest time and effort in their campaigns. An important aspect of this effort is getting familiar with the PPC life cycle, and getting in the habit of conducting a regular PPC campaign performance report.

The PPC life cycle is the sequential path that your campaign will go through as people interact with your ads. For example, a campaign focused on lead generation would have the following stages:

• Impression Stage — Is the ad getting enough impressions?
• Click Stage — How many viewers click on the ad?
• Engagement Stage — What actions do users take after arriving on your landing page?
• Conversion Stage — How many visitors result in a conversion?
• Spend Stage — Are you wasting money or generating a lot of conversions?
• ROAS Stage — What is the overall return on advertising spend? Is it positive or negative?

The best digital managers will use PPC reports to monitor the six stages of the PPC life cycle, ultimately figuring out whether the campaign is a success or failure.

In this article, we’ll show you how to measure PPC account success. It’s time to take your Google Ads reporting to the next level!

Stage 1 — Impression Stage

After launching your campaign, your primary concern should be getting impressions. Google uses a complex algorithm to determine when your ads are displayed. This is based on several factors:

• Max CPC (cost-per-click) of your keyword
• Quality Score of your keyword
• Ad extensions
• Quality of your Ad
• Quality of your landing page

At this stage, you should strive to improve these factors so you can generate more impressions. Seek to answer the following questions:

1. Are your keyword bids competitive?
2. Is your keyword quality score good? Could it be improved?
3. Is your impression share high?
4. How many impressions are you losing because of budget restrictions or Ad Rank?
5. What is the average position of your ad? A better position may attract more clicks.

If some aspects aren’t performing, you may be losing out on a significant opportunity.

Opportunity is calculated as follows:

Opportunity = Total Eligible Impressions — Total impression share

When you get a better understanding of the total available impressions and opportunity, you will have a better perspective of the impression stage.

Stage 2 — Click Stage

This is where you measure the number of clicks your ad receives. More clicks generally mean your ad is performing well. Here’s what to look for:

• What is your clickthrough-rate (CTR)?
• What is the average CPC? Ideally, you should minimize this value.

By monitoring clicks activity, you can avoid click fraud and save yourself money that may be wasted on ingenuine clicks. If you find your ad is not getting a lot of clicks, it may be that the content is irrelevant for the viewers.

Stage 3 — Engagement Stage

After someone clicks your ad, they will arrive on your website. Here, you need to measure their activity to gauge audience engagement. It’s a smart move to link Google Ads and Google Analytics.

Here are some important considerations at this stage:

• Bounce Rate — What is the bounce rate of your landing page? A higher rate is a bad sign.
• Avg. session duration — How much time do users spend on your site?
• Time on Page — How long do users spend on a single page?
• Pageviews — How many pages do people visit in one session?
• Loading Speed — Is your landing page quick to load? Does it open well on mobile?
• Targeting — Is one device performing better than others? How about specific geolocations?

If you find users aren’t engaging your landing pages, it could be down to irrelevant traffic arriving on site. Your ad copy, keywords, and landing page must be aligned with each other, and with the desires of the target audience.

Stage 4 — Conversion Stage

This is a critical point of your PPC campaign performance report, as it tells you whether your campaign is delivering on your goals. Ask yourself these questions:

• What is the conversion rate of the campaign?
• How can CRO be improved?
• What is the cost per conversion? Is it worthwhile?

Stage 5 — Spend Stage

While conversions are king, you still need to assess the cost. Consider the following:

• How much wasted spend did you incur? Try to optimize your budget by reducing wasted spend.
• What is the total spend on conversions? If it’s a high proportion, you know things are on track.

Stage 6 — ROAS Stage

The PPC life cycle concludes with the sixth stage — Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). This tells you how much your business earns for every dollar that was spent. You should always look to maximize this ratio and can do so by working hard to improve the previous five stages.

While this process may seem overwhelming, you can undertake everything with ease with the help of the What’s Changed Report from PPCexpo.

7 Key Benefits of the What’s Changed Report

Google Ads reporting doesn’t need to be a tedious, complex nightmare. Here’s how the PPC campaign performance report from PPCexpo makes life easier for you.

1. You Can Visualize the PPC Life Cycle — This report allows you to visually mimic the PPC life cycle, effectively measuring performance at every stage.
2. You Can Gauge the Health of Your PPC Account — The report’s overview page displays red and green arrows. Focus on the red ones to discover problems that need to be fixed.
3. You Gain Actionable Insights — Discover the key factors that need to be optimized.
4. You Can Drill Down — Explore campaign data at a deeper level to learn more about your ads and audience.
5. You Can Compare Periods — Comparative analysis helps you track performance over time.
6. You Can Use Segmentation — View a segmented analysis of every phase to see how different locations, devices, times, and match types impact campaign performance.
7. You Can Schedule Ads Reporting — Automate your account to run regular reports, which will save you time.

Ads Reporting is Easy with the PPCexpo Campaign Performance Report

When you’re learning how to measure PPC account success, there is a lot to consider. It takes time to do Google Ads reporting correctly.

With the help of the PPC account performance report from PPCexpo, you can streamline this process. This will save you a lot of time and frustration, and ultimately, you can be sure that your PPC campaigns will improve as a result.

Check out the PPCexpo What’s Changed Report now to get your campaigns on track to bigger and better goals.