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The word “complicated” rarely carries any positive connotation. For instance, a complicated relationship is one with lots of issues and conflict. A complicated equation is difficult to solve.
You don’t want complicated things in your life; you want simple and easy.
Unfortunately, for all the value that pay-per-click (PPC) brings to marketing, it’s rarely anything but complicated.
The problem has to do with the many different types of marketing metrics involved with PPC campaigns.
Even if you operate a small Google Ads account, the different combinations of dimensions and metrics can create chaos.
The larger the account, the more chaos you have to manage. It’s a simple fact that more dimensions and metrics create more combinations that you need to analyze.
In this discussion, we’ll look at the different types of marketing metrics involved with PPC. We’ll also look at how to navigate an account with many combinations of metrics and dimensions.
Search engine advertising is the most popular form of paid marketing. It’s essentially a way of buying traffic to your website, instead of trying to “earn” site visits organically.
It can be a potent mechanism for building your business.
However, the different types of marketing metrics associated with PPC make it exceptionally challenging.
First, you need to determine which metrics are valuable and worthwhile for analysis. Then, you need to manage how various dimensions affect the complexity of the data.
Not to mention, several problems can arise during the actual analysis itself.
Metrics are used to help you understand your campaign performance. Each metric represents a piece to the puzzle of what’s happening in your campaigns. The value of those metrics tells you how good or bad your efforts are performing for each category.
For some metrics, a high count is a good thing. For instance, you want the highest number of conversions, impressions, clicks, etc.
A low count is desirable in other metrics. A high cost per conversion, for example, would mean you are spending a lot for each conversion. Yet, you want to minimize costs.
The types of marketing metrics in PPC include many but you cannot ignore the followings:
In this section, we’ll define what some of these metrics actually mean for your campaigns and Google Ads account.
Impressions are how many times your search ads appear on the page. You can use this metric to measure how many times your ad has been shown to audiences.
Impression share is a percentage of how many impressions your ads receive out of all possible impressions. Google Ads further dissects impression share by two categories:
By investigating why you are losing impression share, you can determine the best way to remedy the problem. Should you increase your daily budget? Increase your bids? Work towards improving Quality Scores?
This is a straightforward metric that reflects how many times your paid ad message is clicked. You can use clicks to gauge how effective your ads are at enticing audiences.
If you have a low number of clicks, you may want to revisit your ad copy to make it more compelling.
Clicks are also crucial because of the PPC model. Remember, PPC stands for pay-per-click. This means that the more clicks you receive, the higher your costs.
Your CPC value is the average amount you pay for each click. Click costs will vary based on a variety of factors.
As a cost-related metric, you want your CPC to be as low as possible. It’s also a metric that you want to monitor very closely.
If your CPC suddenly rises, you could be overspending for every click. If you aren’t careful, a sharp spike in CPC could devour your budget in a short time.
The CTR metric is a ratio of your impressions to clicks. How frequently do people see your ad (impressions) and then click?
CTR = Clicks / Impressions
Alongside clicks, you can use CTR to measure how efficient your ad messages are at creating website traffic.
Google Ads uses Quality Score as a way of rating your ads as below, average or above average.
Google looks at your ads’ relevance to the targeted keywords, the relevance and quality of your landing pages, expected clickthrough rates and other factors to determine this rating.
Quality Score is a vital metric for many reasons. Most obvious, it’s a quick way to identify the weakest points of your account.
Improving low Quality Scores is always a smart move. Google wants to provide its search users with the best possible search experience, including the ad content they see.
When you have above-average Quality Scores, Google offers certain benefits. It’s almost like a reward for creating outstanding ad experiences for their users.
Arguably the best benefit is higher ad ranks for lower costs. That’s a guaranteed method for improving ROI!
Whereas your clickthrough rate is a ratio of clicks to impressions, the conversion rate is the percentage of conversions to clicks.
What is a conversion? A conversion is the desired action that you want site visitors to perform. Make a purchase, sign up for a newsletter, subscribe to a service, download an ebook are all examples of conversion activities.
In simple terms, your conversion rate is the percentage of your website visitors who convert based on your business goals.
To access conversion and conversion rate data, you need to enable specific tracking tags on your website. These tags trigger when a customer reaches a page on your site.
If you want to know a great conversion rate for your business, you should have a baseline. This means that you should establish what your conversion rate is and what you wish to achieve in the next thirty days, six months, or one year
Cost per action is how much it costs you to obtain a successful conversion. If your conversion goal is sales-related, you can think of CPA as the cost of a new customer.
CPA = Total Cost Of Conversions / Total Number Of Conversions
You want to work towards reducing your CPA. If you can spend less on average for a conversion, it leaves more room for profit.
Total conversion value is the total value (in dollars) of all of your conversions. You can use this metric to see how much money your campaigns have generated.
It’s the direct value of your PPC efforts!
To correctly measure your total conversion value, you need to set conversion values. You can use an average conversion value, which is how much customers typically spend.
Alternatively, you use transaction-specific values. This method is best when you have a broad price range across your various products or services.
ROAS is the return that you receive from your PPC campaigns. It is how many dollars are generated from one dollar of ad spend.
ROAS = Profit From Ad campaign / Cost Of Ad Campaign
This is a crucial metric that lets you see whether you’re making or losing money on your PPC efforts.
ROAS is often confused with ROI. The primary difference is that ROI measures your entire PPC strategy’s returns. ROAS looks at the returns from only a small part of that strategy.
Dimensions are ways that you can describe or segment your metric data. They are non-numeric categories that help you view your data from different angles.
This is extremely valuable from an analysis standpoint. It makes data more approachable. Instead of looking at 30,000 clicks across your campaign, you can filter the metric by things like device type, hour of day or user location.
By looking at the same data through different dimensions, you can gain deeper insight into what’s actually driving performance in your campaigns.
Dimensions make the data easier to understand and detect opportunities and possible problems.
There may be many in marketing but types of data dimensions in PPC include things like:
This section will outline how you can use each dimension to analyze the different types of marketing metrics associated with PPC.
Any marketer knows how crucial timing is to the success of their campaigns. The hour of day (HoD) dimension helps you see how metrics perform at each hour of the day.
Any campaign will have low and peak times throughout the day. The same is true for days of the week. Your audiences are more active some days than others.
When you can combine HoD and day of week data, you can entirely map out the best times to advertise.
With proper ad scheduling, you can reduce costs and improve performance!
One of the essential components of your campaigns is your keyword selection. Keywords are how you target search users with your ads. If you are selling blue jeans, then you want to target keywords like “men’s blue jeans,” “designer blue jeans,” “blue jeans for kids,” etc.
The keyword dimension is helpful for zooming in on how specific keywords perform for each metric.
Your search ads are targeting users in many different locations. The user location dimension allows you to segment your metric data based on where users are located.
You can use this dimension first to see where your visitors are when clicking your ads. Then, you can compare performance across locations to see which areas are most interested in your products.
Even if you’re operating a PPC campaign locally, the user location dimension still matters. You can view specific towns and neighborhoods that are interacting with your ads.
Search terms can be confused with keywords, but they are different. Keywords are the words that you specifically target. Search terms are the actual searches that users make which trigger your ads.
If your keyword is “blue jeans,” your ads will appear for searches related to blue jeans, even if it isn’t an exact match. Your ads will appear when users search “cheap blue jeans,” “women’s blue jeans,” “buy blue jeans” and many other phrases.
Paying attention to this metric-dimension combination will help you understand how your keywords relate to search terms. You’ll also improve your understanding of what topics and qualities matter to your audiences.
The destination or final URL is the page on your website that audiences reach after clicking one of your ads.
Often, the final URL is set to a landing page. This is a specifically crafted page that relates to the content of the ad copy.
If your ad is targeted at people shopping for new shoes, you don’t want audiences to appear on your homepage. You want them to go right to your shoe-related product pages.
Organic marketing means creating traffic through unpaid or “organic” means. If a customer reaches your site through an organic link on the search engine results page, it is not considered paid traffic.
The paid and organic dimensions allow you to compare performance between your organic and paid messages. You can even see how performance changes when there are both paid and organic results on the results page.
Comparing paid versus organic traffic can yield some interesting insights. It shows when search users prefer paid content over organic and vice versa.
Users connect to the Internet using many different device types. This means that they are also engaging with your ad content using these varying devices.
The two most significant devices are desktop and mobile. It’s extremely valuable to compare audiences in these two device categories.
Mobile users and desktop users behave very differently from one another. Once you understand these subtle quirks, you can build ad experiences specific to each device type.
One of the most common ways to segment your PPC metrics is by campaign or ad groups.
These account parts are structured to segment your targets, goals and other elements. Thus, they are excellent dimensions to use when digging into your PPC metrics.
When you analyze data specific to a single campaign or ad group, you discover which areas of your account are performing best. This knowledge can be vital when deciding how to improve your strategies.
Metrics are the quantitative values of the various data points associated with PPC marketing. They are expressed by numbers, percentages, dollars, etc.
Dimensions act as labels to qualify those values and describe what’s happening behind those numbers. Dimensions are non-numerical values.
Knowing how many total clicks your account receives isn’t actually that helpful. You don’t get a clear picture of what’s happening until you add dimensions to the mix.
What devices are creating the most clicks?
What locations are these clicks coming from?
Which campaigns / ad groups are generating the most clicks?
When are clicks occurring?
These (and many others) are all essential questions that you need to answer. Without dimensions, it would be impossible to understand your Google Ads account fully.
Managing a Google Ads account is not easy. Many obstacles and complexities can arise in the process. These problems detract from your ability to make timely, intelligent adjustments to your campaigns.
One of the primary sources of complexity in PPC is the combinations of metrics and dimensions. We’ve discussed several examples of both in this guide.
Each combination of metric and dimension (sometimes you’re combining a metric to multiple dimensions) adds another layer that you must analyze.
Example: Steven is a PPC manager. He analyzes his clicks (metric) from desktop users for each day of the week (dimensions). This analysis reveals that performance is solid for all days except Wednesday. From this first analysis, a novice PPC manager may conclude that Wednesday is not a good day for advertising. However, Steven knows better. He then analyzes the same data for mobile users to discover that Wednesday is one of the best days for this device type. This demonstrates why it is so critical that you analyze many combinations of metrics and dimensions.
Even a small PPC account will have hundreds to thousands of combinations. That’s a lot of data to analyze manually. Now imagine you’re operating a much larger account with millions of possible metric-dimension combinations.
It’s just not possible without some help from PPC management tools, especially if you are digging for deep insights.
The need for sophisticated PPC management tools can’t be overstated. Again, manual analysis of metric-dimension combinations just isn’t feasible if you want deep, actionable insights.
If you want to make sense of the hundreds-of-thousands of metric-dimension combinations in your Google Ads account, you need the number-crunching power of AI-enabled tools.
This section will look at some of the different PPC tools to invest in as a manager.
Some metric-dimension combinations are more valuable than others, especially in terms of completing your account goals. For instance, if you are trying to drive sales, you care more about conversions than impressions.
A PPC reporting tool creates dashboards, charts and other helpful instruments for measuring your most important metrics and dimensions.
Which keywords are giving you the most impressions?
How is ad budget being spent across keywords?
How are conversions changing day-to-day?
Reports allow you to have an answer to these questions. Here are some examples of what these reports look like:
This screenshot was created using PPCexpo Reports. These are some of the many different reports included with this tool.
You can access PPC Reports from here.
Thanks to these reports, you can keep an eye on your most important data. The helpful visualizations make it easy to tell what’s going on.
PPCexpo Reports is also helpful when you want to share results with stakeholders or clients. These handy visuals allow you to express complex data in an easy-to-digest format.
With a PPC reporting tool, you’re able to simplify your data and analysis process drastically. However, you still have to monitor these various reports manually. Plus, you may not have reports available for every combination.
This is where AI and machine learning step to the plate.
Aside from the complexity of the data itself, the other reason that manual analysis just isn’t feasible is that PPC metrics are changing constantly.
Every interaction that audiences have with your ads, whether good or bad, changes the narrative of your campaigns.
You’d have to dedicate all of your time and attention to stay on top of your Google Ads account. Not only is that not possible, but it’s also not a smart use of your time, especially since there are AI tools that can handle this tedious job for you!
Thanks to its powerful machine learning algorithms, PPC Signal is one of the best tools to help you automated your Google Ads management.
The tool monitors your campaigns 24/7 and detects any significant changes to your metrics that need a deeper look.
This allows you to stay on top of every substantial change to your campaigns. Instead of wasting time monitoring these shifts and trends yourself, you can let PPC Signal do it for you.
That leaves 100% of your time for enacting positive changes and course corrections to improve your PPC performance.
PPC Signal uses your historical campaign data and analyzes every possible metric-dimension combination to find risks and opportunities.
An opportunity signal means that action will result in a positive change in your campaign. Let’s say that PPC Signal detects a spike in clickthrough rates for a specific keyword. This is an excellent opportunity because more clicks mean more potential conversions!
A risk signal is a change that requires action or else a negative change in your campaign will occur. Risks are problematic areas that need immediate attention. For instance, if your cost per conversion increases over the last few days, you may want to make a change to preserve your budget.
When you first open PPC Signal, you’ll see all of the active signals that the system has found. You may have several active alerts at once, especially if you’re using the tool for the first time.
While it helps to see the complete list of active signals, not all of these insights carry the same value.
Naturally, you’ll want to resolve signals that impact your marketing goals first. You may also want to focus on a specific campaign, location or another dimension.
Thanks to PPC Signal’s expansive filtering options, you can get right to these high-priority items.
Here are some of the ways that you can filter your active signals.
This is the filter for you if you want to look at signals for a specific campaign. The default setting is for PPC Signal to display changes across all your campaigns. However, you may want to focus on one campaign at a time. Alternatively, you can use this filter to exclude some campaigns from your list of active signals.
You can get even more detailed with your signal targeting by using the ad group filter. This works exactly like the campaign filter, except one level deeper. You can select individual ad groups that you want to appear in your active signals.
Sometimes, you want to get right to the basics and look at signals related to individual keywords. This filter is used to analyze the smallest but most crucial components of your PPC account.
You can use campaign, ad group and keyword filters at the same time to get right to the parts of your account you care about the most.
As mentioned, users connect to ad content on a variety of devices. You can’t treat these audiences the same because they behave very differently. This is particularly true between desktop and mobile users.
The device type filter allows you to choose signals that pertain directly to mobile, desktop, tablet or smart TV users. By default, this filter is set to include all devices.
The geo filter is used to select specific geographical locations that your campaigns are targeting. You can see detailed signals for specific areas. If you know the physical locations that provide the best returns, you can start with these places first.
This filter is also great if you notice that you’re getting less traffic from a particular area. You can investigate if any risk signals are causing this dip in performance.
Timing is everything in marketing. The HoD filter will let you look at signals from specific times throughout the day. This filter is set to include all times by default. If you want to look at an exact hour or range, you have to check the boxes individually.
So far, we’ve covered dimension-related filters. With PPC Signal, you can also select alerts based on different types of marketing metrics. This allows you to quickly access changes in your Google Ads account that affect your key performance indicators.
PPC Signal organizes metrics by funnel position:
You could use these filters to include all metrics at a given funnel position or select a specific metric to investigate.
The default setting for PPC Signal is only to show the “Best” quality signals. These are changes in your account that the system has fully vetted and verified.
Signal quality is essentially how accurate PPC Signal determines each alert is based on your account’s past performance. The “Best” signals are the ones that the system is most confident about.
Other tiers of signal quality, like “Better” and “Good,” may also be worth exploring. However, as you move into “Poor” quality signals, you should be very careful. These signals may not be very accurate.
As we mentioned, PPC Signal labels each signal as either a risk or an opportunity. This final filtering option allows you to choose whether you want to see one type of signal.
For instance, you may decide to resolve all of your account risks before capitalizing on the remaining opportunity signals.
There’s no way to ignore the hundreds of thousands of metric-dimensions combinations that exist in your campaigns. You have to explore these combinations to gain a complete picture of your PPC strategies.
However, you can get some help managing these combinations through tools like PPC Signal and PPCexpo Reports.
The bottom line is that AI-powered tools like PPC Signal simplify the inherently complex nature of managing a Google Ads account.
This is an unbeatable advantage for your account. By making faster, smarter decisions in your PPC marketing, you can build an edge over the competition.
Want to know just how many combinations exist in your own Google Ads account? Check out the free Combinations Calculator offered by PPCexpo.
Once you see just how many combinations exist in your account, PPC Signal will be a no-brainer.
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