One of the best things about PPC is that advertisers have ample data at their fingertips. It allows them to make the necessary changes in real-time. However, the analysis of all the data can feel overwhelming if you are not focused on the right metrics. The worst thing that can happen for PPC advertising is when you end up focusing on the wrong metrics.
There are several aspects with unique purposes that you can track for your PPC advertisements. But you need to prioritize the right performance indicators to achieve your campaign goals. That is why it is necessary to align your campaign goals with your business goals before developing a PPC campaign.
The Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) we will discuss are meant for the most common business marketing goals. However, you may have unique goals for your organization.
If you cannot relate to these KPIs or have doubts about using them, we will suggest that you consult a professional SEO company like Wicked Cow Marketing. They will help you identify your business and marketing goals and also guide you towards better PPC campaigns.
These are the five PPC KPIs that align with the most common campaign end goals.
Measure Sales Increase
The end goal of most PPC campaigns is to drive more sales. It can be through e-commerce purchases, sales from your website, or leads generated from other sources that eventually result in sales. Therefore, if your ultimate goal is to increase sales, you should track the KPIs that evaluate the impact of your PPC campaigns on your sales.
Measuring the factors that influence sales is probably the easiest for e-commerce websites. They can track purchase data in real-time and monitor the different aspects associated with it. However, measuring purchases from your business website or store can be a little more difficult.
You can try to acquire first-party data by connecting the transactions from your business website or in-store purchases to your PPC advertising campaigns. You can also urge your target consumers to book the products or services in advance through the advertisements.
Some advertisers offer digital coupons that users can redeem while making purchases. It enables the advertiser to track the sales generated from their campaigns.
Measure Lead Generation
Tracing the leads generated from your PPC campaigns can also give you an idea of your sales lift. You will have to track the entire customer journey to analyze this aspect. Lead volume and cost per lead or essential KPIs that you need to follow.
However, you should bear in mind that not all of the leads generated are equally beneficial for your company. That is why it is also necessary to follow qualified marketing and sales leads along the sales pipeline. Measuring the conversion rates from different parts of the sales funnel will allow you to understand the effectiveness of every channel and campaign.
If you do not have a clear way to track the customer’s journey from click to sales, you can use a marketing mix modeling. It allows you to monitor the lead generation trends by taking a look at the performance baselines. You can compare the performance of your PPC campaigns against these baselines once you run the ads.
Calculate Return on Ad Spend
If you want to understand the financial benefits of your PPC campaigns, you should calculate your Return on Ad Spend. You simply need to divide the revenue generated from your PPC campaigns by the amount you spend on ads. It will allow you to monitor if the revenues seem justified compared to your ad spend, especially when you are scaling your campaigns.
You should know that the Return on Ad Spend is not always the same as the Return on Investment (ROI). If you want to calculate your actual ROI, you have to take other costs into account beyond ad spend. It will enable you to understand if your campaigns are driving actual profits or not.
Measure Funnel Engagement
Some PPC campaigns are more focused on audience performance and engagement than sales. Also, sometimes measuring sales data could be more difficult to attribute to the campaign goals. In such cases, you should monitor other engagement metrics.
You can use social advertisement channels to monitor the impact of your campaigns on your brand awareness. You can also check your brand’s recall metric on Facebook to help you track your campaign performance. If you feel that these studies are too expensive for you, there are other ways to measure your brand awareness.
You can use the search volume trends to monitor the impact of your PPC campaigns on your brand. Branded search volume should increase if your campaigns to increase brand visibility are working.
Campaigns aimed at the top of the funnel are not always great at driving conversions. If they are, you should track those metrics. But in case they are not increasing conversions, you should watch their long-term impacts using the cookies. It will allow you to track assisted conversions or view-through conversions.
You can also drive the higher funnel traffic towards micro-conversions to get more useful data. Micro conversions can be based on the objectives of your campaigns. For example, you can measure the engagement of visitors to your website resources, such as video views, downloaded product sheets, subscriptions to newsletters, etc.
These aspects indicate that the visitors are interested in your brand and are making efforts to learn more about it. Moreover, it gives you an audience to target through your additional marketing content.
You should also keep an eye on audience engagement through Google Analytics. That way, you can find out whether the users return to your website to complete any additional micro-conversions or exhibit long-term buyer behavior.
Apart from these, there are several other common KPIs that you can monitor for your PPC campaigns, such as Click through rates, conversion rates, cost efficiency metrics, and impression share.
But we feel that the aspects we discussed are often missed in the KPIs to measure the effectiveness of PPC campaigns. Tracking these KPIs will surely enable you to improve the quality and performance of your PPC advertisements.
