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Newcomers to PPC marketing often think the job is finished when their first campaign goes live. This couldn’t be further from the truth!
In reality, PPC marketing is less about marketing and advertising than it is about managing your campaigns and actively working to improve performance. Yes, compelling ad copy and effective keyword targeting are important, but they aren’t one-and-done steps – they are on-going processes!
This discussion will focus on 20 significant areas of a Google Ads account that PPC marketers need to continuously analyze and monitor. When these essential areas are repeatedly improved upon, your ROI is better optimized. You’ll stretch your budget further, achieve healthier returns and maximize your KPIs.
These 20 areas of your account are divided into two categories. The first category is specific campaign metrics that require attention. The second category is specific dimension and other analyses that you can conduct with your PPC data to dig deep and find actionable insights.
Here are the campaign metrics you can analyze:
Then, you can look at various dimensions and analysis types, such as:
Whenever your ad appears on a search engine results page or Google-affiliated site, this counts as an ad impression. This is the first metric that you need to drive conversions and revenues. Without impressions, your ads are not getting seen.
For this reason and several more, monitoring your impressions is vital. Low impressions can signal a problem with your bidding strategy. You may be bidding too conservatively for your ads to rank and appear in front of target customers or might be your keywords are not triggered based on search terms.
Be sure to look at the time of day when measuring impressions. If you aren’t seeing impressions after a certain time of day, it is likely a sign that your budget isn’t high enough. Thus, your budget is running out too early and your ads aren’t placed after a certain time of day.
Impressions can be a wealth of insight about how customers are searching, which can be a valuable source of keyword research. Do they prefer desktop or mobile? What times of day are they most actively searching for products and services, which day of week is performing good and which match type performed well.
PPC marketers can also look at their top impression share % metric. This metric shows you how often your ads list at the top spot. Higher percentages suggest that your ads are often out-ranking the ad messages of your competitors.
Impression share measures how many impressions your ads actually received versus how many impressions your ads could have gained. In other words, it’s the number of times that your ads missed out on displaying for one reason or the next.
Analyzing impression share is a good way to measure what could have been. It sounds melancholy, but it’s actually a good thing. It’s a great strategy for identifying parts of your Google Ads account that need a little extra care to reach the same level of success as your other ad groups and campaigns.
For example, if impression share is exceptionally low for a given keyword, ad group or campaign, it’s a big beacon signaling your attention. So, if you’re ever uncertain what area of your campaign to focus on, this is a great place to find how to drill down the issue.
As you’re analyzing impression share data, look at every level and filter. For example, monitor impression share at the campaign, ad group and keyword level. Also, compare impression share between exact and broad match keywords.
Impressions equal opportunities for conversions. The more opportunities you have, then the more possible conversions there are to acquire. Ideally, you want your impression shares to be high because a low impression share suggests a large number of missed opportunities.
After impressions, clicks are the next step. A click occurs when a Google user sees your ad (thereby creating an impression) and is enticed enough to click your ad message.
Clicks are a good indicator of successful ad copy. If you have a high number of clicks compared to the number of impressions, then it’s a clear sign of compelling, enticing ad copy that can (and should) be replicated elsewhere in your campaigns.
On the other hand, if you have 1,000 impressions and no one is clicking, then something isn’t working with your ad copy or it is not relevant enough to the targeted keyword. In either case, low clicks means there is a problem that needs to be remedied and have focus on how to boost your clicks performance.
Since clicks are such a performance indicator, be sure to analyze them across different device types, times of day and other dimensions. This will help you acquire insights about your target audience, particularly when and where they are most receptive to ad offers. When looking at match type, you can use clicks as a way to measure relevance.
Your goal is to create highly relevant ads that draw clicks. If you aren’t getting clicks on a certain device type, time of day, audience segment, etc., then you need to find out why and make adjustments to correct this!
Cost is simple: how much money are you spending to get your ads displayed and drive clicks. You have to spend money to make money, right? But, if you spend too much and don’t see the correct returns, you might be burning money instead of making it.
Cost is particularly crucial for smaller advertisers that don’t have a big advertising budget. These Google Ads users need to stretch that minimal budget to the absolute limit!
Because cost is such a crucial element of your Google Ads performance, you need to analyze this metric from several angles, including device type, match type and time. Costs are going to change constantly, so don’t sleep on this important metric!
Pay close attention to how your ad is actually performing on each device type and time of day or week. If your ads are getting clicks that aren’t leading to conversions during a certain time frame or on a device type, it may be time to pause those efforts to preserve your budget and lower your costs.
The same is true for keyword match types. Broad match types can be incredibly expensive because they put your ad next to tons of different searches and not all of them will be relevant to your product. If your budget is dissipating quickly, it may be because you have too many broad match keywords. Effective use of keyword match types will lead to success of your campaign in terms of cost.
Find areas where your cost is highest and ask yourself whether the returns from these activities are worth the higher expense.
Conversions are the final step in the ad process. A conversion occurs when a Google user sees your ad, clicks it and then performs the desired action. In many scenarios, this conversion action is a purchase, but it may also be a newsletter sign up, a reservation, a call, app download or any other type of action that is valuable to your business and drives revenue.
As the final piece to the puzzle, it’s an absolute must to measure your conversions. At this point in the PPC process, someone has clicked your ad, which means you’ve been charged your bid amount. You want to be sure that these click cost is then producing returns through conversion activities.
Before you can begin analyzing your conversions, you need to properly enable conversion tracking. This will allow Google Ads to access your website data and accurately determine when a click has turned into a conversion.
If you’re new to PPC marketing, this is a complex step that may require outside help. Improper conversion tracking is arguably worse than no conversion tracking at all! However, once this is completed, you can start analyzing your conversion data.
When monitoring your conversion data, the goal is to find the breadcrumbs that lead to the desired action taking place. Are conversions happening more on mobile versus desktop? What time of day are customers converting the most? Who are the audience segments that are converting? Why is this?
Answering all of these questions (and several more) will allow you to understand and interpret audience behaviors, particularly how they pertain to conversions being made. Then, you can use these clues to encourage more conversions and stronger returns.
Clickthrough rate, or CTR, is a ratio of your impressions versus clicks. It’s a measure of how likely someone is to see and then click your ad message.
CTR is a closely watched metric because not only does it relate to both clicks and impressions, but clickthrough rate is also one of the primary factors that Google uses to assign Quality Score.
Your Google Ads Quality Score determines ad rank, costs per click and other critical components. It’s Google’s way of measuring ads based on their relevance and quality to provide the best experience to their search users. After all, Google doesn’t want bad ads infiltrating the search results pages!
You’ll want to analyze CTR through the same lenses that you examined clicks and impressions. This means looking at device type, time of day, day of the week, keyword match types, etc.
Since CTR impacts your Quality Score and thereby cost, you should also look at the Quality Score versus CTR versus Cost Per Click By Day chart. This is a great analysis because it allows PPC marketers to have a clear vision of how their clickthrough rates are affecting their Quality Scores and CPC on an ongoing basis.
As with measuring and monitoring many of these metrics, your objective is to understand where and why high and low CTR performances occur. Is there a particular time of day or day of the week that attracts a better CTR? Ideally, you want to be able to identify why one campaign or ad group excels at CTR while another struggles.
When it comes to analyzing CTR, answering these questions is crucial. A bad CTR can have a negative impact on your overall Quality Score, which will damage the entire performance of your Google Ads account! Sometimes, it is wiser to pause areas with low CTR, rather than try and repair them.
Cost per conversion, is different from the cost metric. Whereas the latter looks at total money spent on PPC, cost per conversion measures how much it cost for a single conversion to complete the desired conversion action.
It’s crucial that you monitor Cost Per Conversion in relation to your conversion value.
Minimizing your Cost Per Conversion means enhancing your returns, which is the primary goal for any PPC manager. Stakeholders and clients love hearing that you’re producing more money for them with the same budget!
As always, measure your Cost Per Conversion by time and device type. Understanding when your Cost Per Conversion is highest and lowest will make it easier to optimize your strategies accordingly. Cost Per Conversion will also vary greatly based on keyword match types. Broad keywords in particular can cause costly spikes in your Cost Per Conversion.
As mentioned in the above section, Quality Score is the relevance and quality of your ads, keywords and landing pages. Â It is scaled from 1 to 10. Â Higher the number means higher the quality score and you may have good ad position with less cost.
Google rewards PPC accounts that have high Quality Scores on the search engine results pages. Google looks at several factors when determining Quality Score, such as landing page experience, relevance to keywords, expected CTR and more.
Essentially, Google analyzes your PPC strategies for you! When a Quality Score is low, it’s a sign that something is likely wrong. Maybe it’s an issue with your landing page, or the ad copy isn’t relevant enough to the keyword or ad group.
Analyzing Quality Score at every level of your account will allow you to quickly identify the most problematic areas of your campaigns. Even on different devices you can analyze your quality score.
Again, account components with very low scores can wreak havoc on your Google Ads performance. It may be better to pause these parts of your campaigns until you can repair that lost score elsewhere. Otherwise, your entire account may suffer because your reputation with Google Ads is tarnished.
It’s worth mentioning that when you change, edit or remove a campaign, the Quality Score is lost. Thus, when you make any type of change, you need to check back in and measure how this adjustment affected your Quality Scores.
Conversion rate is a percentage of how many conversions are made versus how many ad interactions took place. It is different from CTR. Â For search ads, conversion rate can be easily calculated as:
For example, if you had 1,000 clicks and 50 conversions, then your conversion rate would be 5%. You can also think of conversion rate as how likely a visitor is to convert after clicking.
Since your end goal of PPC marketing is to drive conversions, it’s important to see how often you are successful at achieving this main objective. Conversion rate also relates to cost because you’re charged per interaction.
You want to be converting as frequently as possible. The more clicks that convert, or the better your conversion rate is, the better your CPC and ROI. You’ll minimize wasted spending!
Analyzing conversion rate provides insight towards what device types and times have the highest chance to convert. When it comes to exploring keywords by match type, start with exact matches first before expanding. Exact match keywords attract such a specific, targeted audience that conversion rates are normally much higher. Broad keywords, on the other hand, can attract a lot of bad clicks because it captures a lot of irrelevant search traffic.
Conversion rates help you optimize your sales funnel and understand what behaviors and strategies work at either end. There are some keywords that are valuable in terms of clicks and traffic, but may not create conversions right away because there is not extreme buying intent behind these terms.
ROAS is a major measurement of how successful your campaign and PPC efforts are. You want to know what’s coming from every dollar being spent. That’s exactly what ROAS measures. It is how much revenue is generated from a single dollar being spent on PPC.
Costs change by time of day and day of week, so it’s important to monitor your ROAS from the same angle. Your returns may be stronger at certain times of the day or week than others. A time-of-day and days-of-week analysis will display when your returns are healthiest and weakest.
Alternatively, if you are getting conversions from desktop and mobile devices, you need to compare and contrast the ROAS of each device type. Maybe you are getting more mobile conversions, but the returns may be much, much lower than desktop.
Do you try to lower the cost of your mobile conversions to improve ROAS or increase ad spend on securing a higher number of the more valuable desktop conversions?
As mentioned, broad match keywords often lead to irrelevant clicks with little-or-no value, which damages your ROAS. By analyzing keywords with weak ROAS, you can better identify when keywords are too broad and costing you too much money. In other words, analyzing your return on ad spend will help you get more exact match keywords!
When someone visits your website and immediately leaves, without interacting with any of the content on the page, this is known as a bounce. Bounce rate looks at how often this negative behavior occurs.
The purpose of this metric is to help PPC marketers identify a poor or irrelevant website experience that is causing potential leads to click away from your page before fulfilling any intended action.
A high bounce rate can signal two significant problems with your PPC account. First, it could be a sign that your keyword matches are too broad and funneling irrelevant website traffic to your pages. Alternatively, there could be something poor on your landing page that is deterring potential customers from converting, such as a pop-up, slow load time or other interface issue.
When it’s an issue with your landing page, immediate action needs to take place. A bad landing page will not only detract from your conversions, but it will damage Quality Score and hurt your ROAS. Google certainly looks at bounce rates when judging the quality of your landing page experience!
Bounce rate can vary greatly by device type. If your bounce rates spike on mobile devices compared to desktop ones, it is likely a signal that there is something wrong with how your site loads, displays or functions on smaller devices. Your site may function perfectly on desktop devices, but the experience doesn’t work as well when shrunk to fit a smaller screen.
When a Google user clicks your ad and then bounces away or otherwise doesn’t complete the conversion action, it’s considered wasted spend. You were charged for the ad interaction, but, because the user doesn’t convert, that money was wasted.
The analysis of wasted spend is all about locating high-risk areas that are damaging your ROI. It’s also about identifying the audiences, device types, etc. that are wasting little-or-no money.
Wasted spend can be reduced at many different levels. As is the case with costs, ROAS and other metrics, you want to look at different device types, hours of the day, days of the week and keyword match types to find out where your money is going.
Bad keyword targeting is a common cause of high wasted spend. It may be a matter of too-broad matches, but it can also be that you’re targeting irrelevant terms. This means you need to revise your negative keyword list and add these wasteful search terms to exclude them from future campaigns.
Geography can also cause issues, especially if your ads are displayed in front of people that can’t access your business and its products.
On the topic of location, conducting a geographic analysis of your PPC efforts is a massively insightful tactic. You can see the exact areas where your ads perform best and worst. If you’re conducting local PPC campaigns, this is an absolute must! You want to know what local audiences are most valuable.
If your campaigns are setup with geo-targeting, you can easily be blowing your budget on low-performing or irrelevant areas. Thus, it’s crucial that you take a detailed look at what locations are costing you a lot and not producing the profitable returns to justify this high spending.
As you’re looking at the various locations targeted by your ads, look for areas that are returning you the most amount of success. Also, be on the lookout for locations that your company doesn’t service. You may not even realize that your running ads in these countries, states or cities!
While monitoring and measuring the various metrics attached to your PPC campaigns, the concept of device targeting appears a lot. With the rise of mobile devices, like smartphones and tablets, your customers are interacting with ad content on many different types of screens and devices.
You can’t use the same ad experience on each device type and expect similar, even close-to-similar results. Some ad messages and landing pages will work better on the smaller, mobile screens, while other experiences with appeal more to desktop audience.
Conducting a device type analysis will show you what type of devices work best for your PPC strategies. You want to analyze each campaign and ad message separately. Again, some messages and landing page experience will resonate differently depending on the device of the user.
For this reason, a device targeting analysis can give some clues as to how to optimize ad copy or landing pages for different screens. Some PPC experts conduct campaigns exclusively for a mobile or desktop screen, as this allows them to ensure that their ad experience is specifically catered to these users.
In short, when you analyze and understand how different device type audience interact with ad content, you can create better campaigns and ad experiences that are catered specifically to the user’s preferred device type.
Next to device type, timing is the other big area of interest when analyzing your PPC efforts. The purpose of an ad scheduling analysis is to take all of the insights you’ve gained from measuring each metric by time and finding ways to optimize bid amounts based on the time of day and day of the week.
For example, you may find that, for whatever reason, your ads are unbelievably successful on Monday mornings. You generate lots of valuable conversions that drive hugely positive returns. Sounds awesome, right?
Naturally, you want to ensure that you make the most of this high-priority time. Thus, you can create an ad schedule that boosts bids during this stretch of time. This will ensure that you are getting maximum impressions for this period. Alternatively, you may want to reduce bids for other stretches of time that don’t produce valuable results.
By the end of your ad scheduling analysis, you should have a thorough schedule of when to scale spend up or down to optimize performance and improve ROI throughout the entire day or time of the day (HOD).
Successful PPC marketing ends with a great landing page experience. If your ads are driving clicks and not conversions, or your bounce rates are spiking, then there is a problem with your landing page experience, it might be taking too much time to load. People are finding your ad copy compelling, but your website is pushing them away from converting.
The landing page analysis explores what pages on your site earn the most traffic. You can even see how pages help influence leads on their journey to becoming customers. In other words, you can see the steps and pages that help a normal site visitor convert and become your newest client.
Google ranks landing page experience on a below average, average and above average scale. Â Couple this data with bounce rate and you can identify your best landing page experiences, and your worst.
Then, take some time to really look at each page and decide what makes it a successful or unsuccessful experience. Getting down to the nitty gritty of your landing pages will allow you to continuously produce website experiences that help leads convert, rather than create obstacles that deter them.
Again, it is crucial that you test landing pages based on device type. It may look great on your desktop computer, but how does it function on your smartphone? You can learn about how to make a good landing page
A budget report is another way to analyze and monitor your budget planned versus budget consumed. More specifically, budget analysis creates a summary of your ad budget versus actual spend and revenue generated in a specific period. How to plan for ppc spending is really important to know.
Budget analysis monitors wasted spend, conversion spend and other metrics to determine how much money was budgeted, how much was actually used and what’s left from the budget. It’s another essential dimension of the spending, revenue and profits behind your PPC ads.
Are you allocating too much, or too little money, towards PPC? What would happen if your budget was scaled up or down? These are significant questions to ask, especially when deciding, what is the smartest marketing decision for your business?
A budget analysis will also uncover potential problems with your maximum bid optimization. If bids are set too high, it may exceed what is appropriate to spend on a potential conversion.
Essentially, budget analysis helps you make your campaigns more profitable and avoids issues with ad spend.
Also known as the 80/20 rule, the Pareto Principle states that the majority of your results (roughly 80%) come from only a fraction of your activities (about 20%). In terms of PPC, this means finding the minority of keywords that produce the majority of your results. That means the highest tier of keywords that generate almost 80% of your clicks, impressions, revenue, etc.
The Pareto Principle is a fast and effective way to measure keyword performance and find the 20% (roughly) that actually matter and produce results. When you can identify these top performers, you can effortlessly allocate your resources towards these terms and boost your overall campaign results.
As your PPC account grows and you have more budget to work with, you can scale your campaigns up by putting even more budget towards this top 20% of your keywords. You also ensure that you aren’t putting too much money towards keywords and campaigns that aren’t delivering the same level of results.
The L/N Ratio is an interesting method to quickly and effectively measure your campaigns. It looks at the total cost of conversions in a campaign versus the cost of traffic from keywords that convert at least one time. If you had an L/N ratio of 1, it suggests that every ad has at least one conversion.
A low L/N number suggests an account that is very conservative. While each ad is converting, it may not be producing a lot of conversions or low returns. Ideally, you want your L/N ratio to be 1.5 to 2.0. This means that your account is well balanced and your bidding strategies are neither too conservative nor too aggressive.
At the 2.0 and 2.5 ratio, your campaigns are still performing pretty well, but you may be slightly too aggressive and your wasted spend is starting to climb. Your account can be tightened up and your budget can be better optimized.
An L/N Ratio above 2.5 means that a lot of money is being spent on traffic that doesn’t convert. Thus, your wasted spend metric is extremely high.
Calculating and monitoring your L/N Ratio is very helpful because you can quickly measure your account performance in just a matter of moments. It’s an at-a-glance way to see if you need to investigate your campaigns or if you’re floating in that sweet range of 1.5 to 2.0.
As you are optimizing your Google Ads account and making improvements, you’ll begin reaching the point where certain ad groups and campaigns are thoroughly optimized. Your role as a manager at this point is more monitoring than it is adjusting and making further changes. In other words, your campaigns are so optimized that the work is much less – you no longer need to put in so much time and effort into these areas.
In fact, you may already have successful ad groups and campaigns that are continuously providing strong returns. It’s important to monitor these components, but why ruin a good thing? Why try and fix what isn’t broken? Not every part of your account needs change.
Monitoring the most significant changes shifts can be challenging when every piece is moving at different speeds.
The Top Movers Analysis does the monitoring and identifying for you. It analyzes your PPC data for the most noteworthy changes, whether positive or negative, with regards to your conversions, ROI and overall PPC goals.
There are several advantages to this type of analysis. Not only will you be able to identify the biggest changes affecting your account, but you’ll also be able to determine if these changes are positive or negative. Moreover, the Top Movers Analysis shares insight into why such a change has occurred and the trends and activities that lead to this shift.
Many PPC professionals perform this type of analysis at the start of any type of audit or account check-up. It’s a fast way to see what’s new across your PPC account and how your latest changes have impacted your strategies for better or worse.
Continuous effort is vital to successful PPC marketing. Crafting clever and enticing ad messages and publishing campaigns is only a small piece of the puzzle. Your job as a PPC marketer is really about managing these efforts and finding ways to make them better.
The 20 areas listed in this guide provide an effective roadmap that you can use to learn about your PPC strategy. In particular, you’ll find actionable insights about what’s working and what isn’t. More specifically, you’ll see how your tactics change depending on the time, device, keyword type, location and more.
The more effort you put towards improving your PPC strategy and enhancing your campaign performance, the deeper your understanding of your audience and their behaviors. This knowledge will not only serve you with regards to your PPC marketing strategy, but also your overall marketing strategy.
In this respect, these 20 Google Ads insights are not just valuable for your PPC account, but your entire marketing strategy so here PPCexpo Reporting Tool solves all analysis problems for you. You can find multiple reports with extensive analysis for your campaigns.
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