How Do I Measure the Performance of My PPC Efforts?
By: Thrive Marketing
Tags: Marketing, PPC, SEM, SEO, PPC Marketing

Knowing from the start what your goals are and how you intend to achieve them will help you to measure PPC campaign success and wider marketing performance from day 1.

It’s up to your organisation to review your marketing/sales activities and targets to decide whether you need more traffic, more leads, more conversions from your PPC campaigns. Understanding these basic goals will help you to put together a monthly/quarterly report featuring the metrics and KPIs you really need to know.

Here are six of the most popular KPIs that marketers typically report on:

Clicks

Clicks are a crucial first step for measuring the performance of any PPC campaign.

Without clicks are you generating traffic? No.

Without clicks are you generating leads? No.

Without clicks are you generating sales conversions? No.

We advise regularly monitoring your clicks performance, preferably weekly, to see how your campaign fluctuates through the month and which ad groups and individual ads are garnering the most success.

But you must also consider the next metric — CTR — to get a true picture of whether or not these clicks are generating truly successful results.

CTR

Your Clickthrough Rate (CTR) allows you to analyse how many people viewed your ad, and then how many have actually been clicked.

Total no. of clicks in specific time period / total impressions = CTR

(400/2000) X 100 = 20%

Although there is no right or wrong answer for CTR it’s up to you to measure historical data and use your current business and marketing goals to work out a SMART goal for your CTR.

Quality Score

Your ads’ quality score is a difficult metric to measure and improve as it is Google’s own secretive formula for ranking the relevance and quality of your ad content and landing page experience.

A quality score between 7 to 10 means you pay less for your ads with Google Ads, a score lower than 6 means you will more for your ads.

It’s not a straightforward metric but you should consider these three metrics — CTR, Ad Relevance and Landing Page Quality — as identified by Teach to Fish Digital’s infographic.

CPC

Cost Per Click (CPC) depends largely on what other businesses in the Google Ad Auction are willing to bid on the ad space you’re vying for — they’ve all got higher budgets, your CPC will increase (generally speaking).

Total campaign cost / total number of clicks received = CPC

£1500 / 125 clicks = £24.40

CPA

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA). This is the price you pay for each new customer as defined by Google, it is also based on your quality score.

Total conversion costs / total conversions happened = CPA

£1000 / 18 = £55.55

Targeted CPA is also an optional KPI you can measure. It is a bidding technique that can be applied during campaign setup, allowing you to set bids that will automatically trigger conversions (as many as your CPA budget will allow).

CPM

Clicks aren’t always the end goal. In fact, even if they are you should be closely monitoring your impressions rate as well. Impressions add a great deal of context to your campaign, they particularly provide insight into your market share and how you stack up against competitors.

If your impression share is 30% then there is 70% of the impressions market being soaked up by your competitors — this means you’re decreasing the likelihood of your ads being seen. We need to ensure your impression share remains ‘strong’ to ensure that your ads are being seen over the competition.

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