What is Conversion in Google Ads? How to Do It Right

Conversions are the end goal for many campaigns, but how can you tell if a decent conversion rate is leading to genuine success?

Regardless of who your audience is, measuring funnel activity is a crucial part of understanding how to improve campaign targeting.

The PPCexpo Conversion Performance Report gives marketers deeper insights into their campaigns. In this article, we’ll explore the benefits of the report, and see how to measure the effectiveness your conversions so you can maximize the return on your advertising spend (ROAS).

What is a Conversion?

To put it simply, a conversion in pay-per-click advertising is when a user takes the desired action after seeing your ad. For example, they may sign-up for your mailing list, call your business, or make a purchase.

There are several ways you can track conversions, which vary depending on your business goals.

Macro Conversions

Also known as macro goals, macro conversions are the specific actions that a user may take that represent your website’s primary objective.

On an e-commerce website, a macro conversion could be when the user:

• Subscribes to a service
• Purchases a product
• Requests a quote

Micro Conversion

Also known as micro goals, micro conversions are the specific actions that a user may take that are either:

• A critical step towards achieving a macro conversion; or
• Highly correlated with the journey to achieving a macro conversion, even if isn’t an essential step in that macro conversion.

To give a few examples of micro conversions, users could:

• Sign up for an email list
• Create a new account
• Add a product to their cart

How PPCexpo Conversion Performance Report Can Help?

The PPCexpo Conversion Performance Report provides a detailed drill-down analysis on your conversions and the associated metrics.

Take note of one important prerequisite — you must make sure you have enabled conversion tracking in your Google Ads account and website before you run the report.

Once you have everything set up, this report is a useful summary tool for marketers to measure the following key performance indicators (KPIs) with respect to their conversions.

1. Measure the Factors That May Affect the Conversions

The report provides a detailed analysis of key factors like Impression share, Quality Score, CTR, and Engagement.

All of these may impact conversions, in either a positive or negative way.

• A good impression share indicates that your ad is being displayed to a reasonable number of viewers. A higher share means a greater number of impressions
• A good quality score tells you the ad is ranking high in Google’s search engine results pages (SERP), and subsequently earning a better ad position. By improving your quality score and reducing your average cost-per-click (CPC), ultimately, you will improve your return on investment (ROI).
• A good click-through rate (CTR) means your ad copy and keywords are aligned with user intent, and therefore the ad is relevant for the audience that sees it.
• High engagement means your website content is on point, and is helping drive conversions. If you have high engagement levels but aren’t getting conversions, your product pricing may not be competitive.

2. Measure the Effectiveness Of Your Conversions

In any Google Ads campaign, the ultimate goal is to generate the best Ads ROI. To determine that, you must measure the effectiveness of the campaign.

Google Ads has a range of metrics that allow you to do precisely that.

• Cost per Conversion tells you the cost in getting a conversion. If it’s high, your ROI is relatively low, and much of your advertising budget is being wasted, and vice-versa.
• Conversion Rate is the percentage of people who clicked the ad that ultimately follows through on the call-to-action. If it’s a good rate, your campaign is on target, and vice-versa.
• ROAS (Return on advertising spend) tells you how much you earn in relation to your spending. For example, a 1:10 ratio means for every $1 spent you are earning $10, and vice versa.

3. Measure Your Campaign Targeting

Targeting is an integral part of PPC advertising success. You should define your targets in each campaign, and monitor them closely to look for opportunities to adjust and improve performance.

In the PPCexpo Conversion Performance Report, there are various ways to analyze your targeting:

• Device targeting — You can gauge conversion performance on various devices, as well as assess other factors that affect conversions. If your landing page is failing on mobile, you can rework it to save on wasted spend.
• Geo-targeting — Discover which areas are generating the most conversions, then adjust your budget accordingly.
• Time targeting — Do your ads perform better at certain times of the day? By increasing keyword bids at that time, and running your ads then, you can maximize ROI.

4. Measure the Performance Of Your Keywords And Search Terms

As the building blocks of any search marketing campaign, it’s vital you measure the performance of your keywords. Consider the following:

• Which search terms are driving most of the conversions? Are those search terms added to your keywords list?
• Which search terms are causing problems, should you consider them as negative keywords?
• Do long-tail search terms lead to most of your conversions? Perhaps you can declare them as exact match keywords.
• How does average position affect your conversions? Maybe a lower position generates a better ROI?

Dig Deeper with PPCexpo to Get More from Your Data

While measuring click-through rate (CTR) is important, initially, you should focus more on getting qualified traffic to your site, rather than worrying about conversions.

The PPCexpo Conversion Performance Report covers funnel activity, starting from impressions, and including clicks, engagement, and conversions. It also enables you to compare your most recent period performance with the previous period.

Comparing these two periods allows you to measure the progress of the campaign. You can easily identify any drops or spikes in conversions and its associated metrics, as well as figuring out what part of the sales funnel these fluctuations happened in.

Identifying these patterns is an instrumental part of data-driven marketing, and through associative analysis, you can analyze your PPC data in a way that many marketers are yet to do.

PPCexpo is already using associative analysis technology in this report, and it helps you to drill down to the relevant details of your KPIs, discover new patterns, and ultimately, gain the actionable insights to get the edge on your competition.