The Numbers Game
The core metrics of any PPC account will be the impressions, clicks, cost, and conversions. Each is important in its own way, but what you should expect differs depending on what goals you have.
Impressions - The number of times your ads are seen.
Clicks - The number of times a user clicked on your ad.
Cost - How much you spend on the advertising.
Conversions - How many times the user completed an action you defined as a goal.
Then there are the calculated metrics: click-through rate (CTR), cost-per-acquisition (CPA), and average cost-per-click (Avg CPC), and conversion rate are all important factors in determining the success of your advertising. Again, the ideal values for these metrics are very subjective and depend on your industry, target audience, and business objectives.
Visibility and Brand Awareness
Starting at the top of the sales funnel, the easiest goal to accomplish is also the one that can be trickiest to measure the success of. Getting your brand or product in front of as many eyeballs as possible is the simple part. Making sure they’re the right eyeballs can be a bit trickier. The goal here is to get people to remember your brand so they’ll come back in the future.
Impressions are, in most PPC campaign types, free, and where they’re not free, they’re a lot cheaper than clicks. This simple fact can make visibility campaigns very cost-effective to run. Performance Max, display, and video campaigns are ideal for this, but you can also get good results from search.
The difficulty with visibility campaigns is determining the value you get from them. You’re aiming for widespread visibility here, so the click-through rate and immediate conversions that you can directly attribute to the campaign will be low, if not negligible. Closely monitoring conversions from branded search (both paid and organic) or direct traffic is vital, especially mapping trends with your drive for visibility. But unless you’re working at very large scales, the variations you’re looking for can be easily swamped by everyday variations. Oh, and be very sure you’re filtering out all of the bot traffic that will inflate your direct traffic.
Important secondary metrics to pay attention to here depend on the campaign type. For search, it would be search impression share, the percentage of times your ads were shown for the total number of times they could be shown. For video, the various viewable metrics, which outline how much of your video the user sat through.
Visibility Example
A local brewery has a new alcohol free beer which has tested very well, and they want to drive awareness of this, both to pubs and shops in their local area, as well as the end consumer. Setting campaigns to drive visibility of this product, especially if they have already been working on their brand awareness, is going to be a winning strategy to accompany the launch.
Setting up the direct-to-consumer campaign is going to be easier, especially on Google. Although it’s not officially designed for this, a Performance Max campaign will actually act as an awareness campaign if you can both sell directly from your website and you can supply the right assets. Enticing ad assets, especially images and video, along with the simple guidance that you’re advertising “alcohol free beer”, and you’ll get a lot of impressions very cheaply (especially if you keep a loose CPA target for Google to work with). The difference is that it’s actively looking for people who are likely to actually buy it.
With strong visual assets, you can also push these via Demand Gen, Display, and/or Video campaigns, with the specific goal of maximising reach. While a search campaign might work, it is likely to have a smaller audience (as it’s actively targeting people who are specifically searching for alcohol-free beer, rather than those who might just be interested in it), but it’s likely worth trying it, with either a maximise clicks or target search impression share.
The business-to-business awareness campaign is going to be more challenging to set up. You will need to be more selective with targeting, and temper your expectations, because it’s going to be very small numbers compared to the direct-to-consumer campaign. Is it worth running? Yes, absolutely. The costs of an awareness campaign are generally low, especially with heavily refined targeting. To steer the algorithm, you’re going to want to focus on leads, as mere visibility isn’t going to cut it with such a clearly defined audience. One trick to make sure you don’t miss is a brand/product search campaign to capture anyone who has heard about your new product (maybe they saw one of your DTC ads) and is coming looking for it.
Traffic
The second easiest goal to accomplish is aiming for the maximum number of clicks. There can be a few different reasons to use this as your goal, such as building brand or product awareness for more complex products or services that require more context than an ad can deliver easily. Maybe you’re testing landing pages or evaluating user experience on your website. It can also be a good way to improve your organic search performance, given that Chrome users are all feeding information about their activities to Google as a search ranking factor. So driving traffic to your site through paid ads means there’s more data for Google to work with.
It can also be a useful tool in teaching Google Ads’ systems about your website and your audience, when you don’t have enough data already. This can be handy for both new websites and those websites that see a lot of seasonality. By aiming for clicks, you can quickly provide data for the automated bidding tools so that if you change to targeting conversions or conversion value, it has plenty of data to work with.
Beyond raw clicks, paying attention to CTR is valuable here, as it gauges the accuracy of your ad targeting.
Traffic Campaign Example
One excellent use case for a campaign that operates on maximising clicks to your website is short-term sales. Anyone whose stock moves quickly isn’t going to be overly concerned about maximising their conversion rate; the price is generally the biggest factor in the customer’s decision-making process. If you need to move some excess stock or end-of-line products quickly, then traffic should be what you use for your goal, rather than sales. Setting this up is simple, you can even ignore the campaign objectives Google tries to foist on you and simply set up a straightforward search campaign with a maximise clicks bidding strategy.
If you were to try to set up a maximise conversions bidding strategy to more cleanly focus on users likely to purchase, you’d likely have moved all of the stock you had before the algorithm had learned your target audience.
Sales & Leads
Referred to in PPC as conversions, this should be where a website visitor converts into a paying customer. Back in the days of manual bidding, this required ensuring your keywords, ad copy, and landing pages all worked to channel users to your checkout or contact form. With automated bidding and AI-driven campaigns, you can let Google do a lot of the work.
The metric to pay attention to here, of course, is conversions, but the whole funnel leading to that point is important as well. CTR defines the accuracy of your targeting, conversion rate shows how well the messaging of your ads and landing page drives customer action, and CPA shows how much it’s costing you to get each sale or lead.
Sales Example
Any online shop with an established presence and a fairly consistent selection of products for sale would have campaigns running on maximise conversions or maximise conversion value. These would likely be spread across multiple campaign types, particularly shopping, Performance Max, and search.
Generally (at least according to the figures released by Google), maximising conversion value is going to give better returns. Beyond the initial sale, it can also be helpful to analyse how lifetime value varies across your customer base, and perhaps configure a campaign or two to work on retaining lapsed customers.
Reliable Data
The most important step before you start any of these is ensuring that you have reliable data. This is vital so you know how effective your marketing is being, but also in these days of AI-driven marketing, it’s essential to feed accurate data back to the bidding systems to ensure you get good results.
This is more than just, “Do I have Analytics installed on my website?” This means ensuring you have an operational Consent Management Platform, that you have robust and accurate event triggers to monitor when users do something you want (or don’t want), and that you pay attention to all of this on an ongoing basis to make sure that it is working and giving you clear, accurate information.
