How To Gauge The Success Of Your PPC Campaign (Using KPIs)

When you start making an advert campaign online using PPC, it can be quite tough to see how well it is doing. It is the same with every advent campaign, but PPC campaigns can be particularly tough to grasp.

This is because it is a relatively new – maybe 10 to 15 years old – way of conducting online advertising and since advertising online is quite new itself, this is an area where most people are inexperienced.

How To Gauge The Success Of Your PPC Campaign (Using KPIs)

In fact, most people are used to conducting their advertising through word of mouth, radio, or TV even to this day.

However, PPC can be easily tracked and monitored, which means that if you know how, you can easily understand how well your campaign is doing.

In this article, we are going to look at how to gauge the success of your PPC campaign and how to use KPIs to do so.

PPC Campaigns: The Basics

To start with, let’s define just what PPC is. PPC is a type of online marketing and advertising that is an acronym for Pay Per Click.

How this works is that you bid on keywords that can be written into a search engine or agree with a website owner to place your advertisement on their site, usually using a third party (like Google) as an intermediary.

When those keywords are written into a search engine or when a person goes on the website, your ad will be displayed.

If it is through a website, then there are a number of variables that can affect this, like what kind of advert it is and how many other adverts have paid to use that space, but mostly you are bidding on where your advert is going on the site.

If it is through a search engine, then you as the advertiser will bid to have your advert display when certain keywords are used.

Whose ever keywords are more relevant to the user’s search and whoever has placed down the most money will have their advert displayed.

Then, when the user clicks on your advert, they will be redirected to your website and the website owner and the intermediary will take a fee from you.

Considering the fee only correlates to the amount people are actually visiting your website or online store, then this is quite a cost-effective advertising measure.

How To Gauge The Success Of Your PPC Campaign

There are a few ways to gauge the success of your PPC campaign while it is running, which is one of the benefits of engaging in such a campaign.

Knowing what these indicators are and how to gain information on your campaign is crucial, but sometimes can seem a little tricky.

One of the best ways is to use Google Analytics. Google is one of the largest companies in the world, and the way it makes its money is by being an intermediary for advertisers and affiliates websites willing to display adverts.

It lets people use Google Ads and Google AdSense to help bring advertisers and affiliates together for a small fee on each PPC.

As such, if you start a PPC campaign using Google Ads, you can link it to Google Analytics. This program will then give you updates constantly about how well your campaign is progressing.

It will tell you everything about your campaign, from what keywords translate into clicks most and even whether you keep getting repeat people coming onto your website.

Since you are paying visitors to come to your site, it is hugely important to know why they come.

Using KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)

Analytics and other such software systems will give you feedback from your campaign and provide you with information on KPIs. A KPI is a Key Performance Indicator and these are very important to your campaign – from the planning stage to the end of it.

They help to establish the overall goals for your advertising campaign and help you understand the means to reach these goals, by giving you constant metrics on how well your campaign is doing.

Since they can be analyzed quickly to see the progression of your campaign, they can also help stabilize your goals or make them more realistic.

So, before looking at most KPIs, think hard on what you want from this campaign. Do you want to boost traffic to your website? Do you want to convert browsers to buyers?

Do you want to increase your product or brand’s overall recognition? Do you want to build a larger client base? These are just some areas you may want to aim for, but it is important to consider your aims at the very least before moving forward.

How To Gauge The Success Of Your PPC Campaign (Using KPIs) (1)

Once you have figured that out, you can start looking at what KPIs you may need to consider as important to your targets. With this in mind, we have put together some of the most useful KPIs below:

Impressions, Click-Through-Rate, And Clicks

An impression is when an ad appears in front of a user, and a click is when that ad is clicked on by the user.

Therefore, a click-through-rate is the amount of impressions that turn into genuine clicks or more simply, the amount of times an ad is clicked on when it appears in front of the user.

Tracking your click-through-rate is incredibly important, as it tells you how enticing and attractive your advert is to customers.

To work out your click-through-rate, divide the number of clicks by the number of impressions and times it by 100. This will give you the percent of people clicking on your advert overall.

For example, if 10,000 impressions occur with your advert, but only 500 people click on it, then you do: 500/10,000 = 0.05. Then, 0.05 * 100 = 5. So, your click-through-rate is 5%.

This may seem like a bad click-through rate, but it is actually pretty good. The average click-through-rate is around 2%, making it above average.

As such, if you notice that your click-through-rate is rising, it might be worth investing some money to get more impressions. Your adverts are clearly working.

Conversion Rate

A conversion rate will tell you how many of the users who clicked through to your site completed the action you wanted them to, whether this be a purchase or signing up for an email.

A click-through-rate is great and all, but it doesn’t help if no one buys anything.

This metric will tell you if there is anything to improve upon when your customers are redirected to your front page, and whether you may need to do something to convince them to do what you want them to.

Bounce Rate

This is the opposite of a conversion rate and measures how many people went to your site and left without doing what you wanted them to.

If your bounce rate is high and your conversion rate is low, then you need to make some major changes to your front page to get it up.

Conclusion

Gauging the success of a PPC campaign can be a difficult thing to do, but by using metrics and statistics that are linked to your campaign, it shouldn’t be so difficult at all.

Jackoneil
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