Pay Per Click Tracking: Getting It Right
Most marketers or at least a good number are familiar with PPC advertising. Pay per click tracking involves evaluating the performance of your marketing campaigns. You can only be sure that your ad spend is making a difference to your bottom-line by tracking results.
It means paying extra attention to key metrics including click-through rates, cost per conversion, cost per click, the quality score, and the total cost. Understanding where you stand compared to other benchmarks gives you insight into the areas to build improvement.
Every Metric Matters
PPC marketers know that all metrics are valuable. Metrics focus most of their efforts on ROI and help in moving profitability to the winning curve. Traffic data such as clicks and impressions tell you the amount of search demand you have and the number of people responding to your ads.
Conversion data metrics, for instance, gauge the effectiveness of your landing pages and your ads in generating leads. When analysing PPC campaigns, there are some significant metrics you will need to understand including:
1. Clicks: Be keen on the number of times users click or engage with your ads
2. Impressions: This is the number of times your ads are served in the search engine results
3. CTR: This stands for the percentage of the leads that clicked your ad
4. Quality Score: It indicates how relevant your keywords, ads, and landing page are on a scale of 1-10
5. Average Position: The higher the position in SERP, the more the visibility you get. When on average position, you get an indication of where you rank compared to other ads.
Assess ROI
Assessing Return on Investment (ROI) is critical in PPC tracking. You want to understand the relationship between profitable returns and investment. Focusing on the core metrics including CTR, CPC as the quality score as the go-to way of measuring your campaign performance can only give you a partial revelation of your successes and failures. For you to gain a more accurate reflection, you need to utilise conversion tracking. Google AdWords has a conversion tool that helps in measuring conversion.
It gives more insight into how effective the keywords used and the ads are as far as conversion performance is concerned. This is a strategic way of helping you make informed decisions on a more effective scale. You cannot just select a keyword, set up your campaign, and then relax waiting for your leads to come through. Failing to analyse your campaign is tragic for your money. Should the average sale increase, ROI goes up.
While it decreases, so does ROI. When PPC increases, ad spending does the same, meaning ROI decreases. Each time the conversion rate goes up, you need to spend less on ads. All of this comes down to four major elements including clicks, conversions, clicks, and revenue, all of which can be monitored through tracking. The most essential aspect of conducting an ROI analysis is that you can determine whether the strategy is worth sticking to or not.
Analyse Conversion Data
After setting your conversion tracking for several weeks, employ the search funnel analytics. This will help you get detailed data about the conversions in terms of the period that elapsed between the customers who clicked on your ad and when the conversion was completed.
You also get to track the number of times customers saw your ad before finally converting. When you analyse this data, it will be possible and easy to gain customer insights on how they behave on the website.
View the Campaign from a Macro Level
When setting your PPC campaign, think long term. Looking further into the future helps you understand the need to give your project enough time to grow before you can finally evaluate it. You cannot measure your success levels in just a week for instance. Growth is gradual, and results take time.
The nature of PPC campaigns does not allow a marketer to abandon a project when the ROI threshold is not met. You cannot second guess your project before evaluating it. Even when the returns seem stagnant, you can still reap from your campaign. You need to assess efficiency with the help of various key performance indicators (KPI) and not just one metric.
Understand your KPIs in the initial stage of your campaign. This is what helps you analyse results quickly throughout the campaign. Have goals and align your work with them. The objectives you have could vary for each campaign, some of which could include:
• Promoting brand recognition
• Enhancing website traffic
• Converting leads to sales
With clear goals, you can focus on one KPI at a time and determine the metrics that give you insight into the KPIs.
Choose what to Measure
Now that you have set goals and know what KPIs matter to your campaign, decide on what you should focus on first. It means aligning and measuring your goals with the drive of capturing more leads. Because your goal is to rank high in the search results, determine how much you are willing to spend per click.
Analyse your total impressions and the number of shares. The number of shares should at least be at a high of 98 percent. If it is low, then you need to establish the right keywords that will help in giving better results and be sure to bid high.
PPC campaigns are all about investing your time and money for a good course. KPIs allow you to measure and track the efficiency of your PPC investment. With all the marketing efforts you have employed, you want to get a positive return on investment, especially when you have to pay for an ad.
Your PPC campaign can seem overwhelming to determine if it is paying off. It is necessary to employ proper tracking techniques to measure the efficiency of your investment. The right planning and execution in a PPC campaign can help drive potential leads to your site and turn them into profits.
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