As a business, it’s impossible to measure your success without tracking the right performance elements accurately. Metrics that companies use to track their success are called key performance indicators, or KPIs. When you’re investing money in digital strategies like pay per click advertising (PPC), measuring your results with the right KPIs becomes even more critical.
Successful PPC Requires Understanding Your KPIs
When it comes to PPC, there are many KPIs that come into play. Measuring them all and analyzing how each of them plays into your marketing strategy can be an unsolvable puzzle. If this is your frustration right now, we encourage you to relax. You don’t need to measure every KPI and to illustrate our point, here are the five that matter most to your PPC campaign.
Clicks and Click Through Rate
These are two different metrics, but they’re close enough that we can combine them to measure the success of your pay per click advertising. Clicks are merely the number of times your PPC ad was clicked on. It’s an essential number of measuring, but it doesn’t tell us the full story on its own – which why you also need to pay attention to your click-through rate (CTR).
The CTR is a KPI that measures how many people clicked on your ad compared to its number of impressions, or the number of times your ad came within view of your audience. It’s a simple percentage – for example, if out of 100 impressions your ad was clicked on twice you would have a 2%
CTR.
Conversion Rate
So, you know the number of clicks you’re getting, which is great. However, how many of those clicks are following through to conversion? Your conversion rate is the percentage of conversions you earn as a result of your PPC campaign. This KPI can help you recognize opportunities for optimization. For example, if you’re getting a high CTR, but conversions are falling short, you might want to look at what happens after the user clicks the ad.
Cost Per Click (CPC)
This indicator is a simple measure of how much you pay each time a user clicks on your ad. The CPC of your ad depends on multiple elements but is an essential number for businesses to keep in mind. For example, a small business may try a strategy with the lowest possible CPC but realize that they’re getting little traction from it. By investing slightly more, their budget might take more of a hit initially, but the pay off could be significantly more profitable.
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
CPA is a KPI that helps you assess whether or not your current PPC strategy is designed for profit. The CPA measures how much your PPC campaign costs and compares it against the actual number of conversions acquired through the PPC ad. This tool is useful for determining if you’re spending too much or too little for customer acquisition through paid advertisements.
Quality Score
A quality score is an elusive number assigned by Google that determines the placement of your PPC ad on their search engine. It takes into consideration keywords, relevancy, targeting metrics and probably a few secretive metrics. A higher quality score earns you a better ranking and a lower cost per click.
Pay Per Click & KPI Experts
Are you interested in learning more about PPC management and how to measure your KPIs for success? Our team can help. Contact us today for a free audit on your PPC accounts and learn more about building PPC campaigns that perform at a high level.
