The 9 Most Important PPC Metrics to Report
PPC, or pay-per-click, advertising has proven itself a vital tool in your marketing toolbox for driving traffic and generating leads. One benefit of incorporating PPC into your strategy is that it is easy to track using specific, important PPC metrics.
These metrics, more commonly known as KPIs, or key performance indicators, are a significant component in tracking your business performance in alignment with your objectives and goals. Creating and implementing strategy isn’t nearly as effective if you aren’t reporting correctly or looking at the right metrics. To ensure you are taking full advantage of your PPC advertising, let’s delve into some of the most important PPC metrics your business should be focusing on in your next paid campaign:
Defining Your Objectives
Before you can implement a paid search campaign, you must define your objectives. Defining these objectives gives everyone in your company a singular, clear idea of their role within the campaign, and also guides you to the most important KPIs you should monitor throughout its duration.
In a paid campaign, it is helpful to look at a variety of metrics to gain a more holistic view of how it is performing, so you can reach your goals as efficiently and effectively as possible — this is how you are able to evaluate your KPIs.
Not sure how to set up a KPI? This blog will help!
The Top PPC Metrics to Report
1. Impressions
Impressions refer to the total number of times an advertisement was viewed by your target audience. Knowing the total number of times your advertisement was seen allows you to quantify your advertising efforts. Impressions are an important comparative KPI, meaning that collecting impression data can help better analyze and draw insights about other important PPC metrics.
2. Clicks
There is no online conversion that doesn’t start with a click. A click not only shows that someone was exposed to your advertisement, but also that they were enticed enough to take action. This KPI numerically shows you how many real opportunities your business had to convert a viewer into a potential lead or customer. Like impressions, clicks are an effective KPI to use in addition to other metrics to gain even deeper insights into the success of your paid campaign.
3. Cost-Per-Click
Cost-per-click, or CPC, is the actual price you are paying per click in your PPC campaign. As mentioned, a “click” represents a potential customer choosing to interact with your company, making it a very important metric. Incorporating CPC as a KPI in your campaign reporting shows you exactly how much you are spending for each interaction. Knowing this information is key to ensuring that you are remaining within your budget parameters.
If you are looking for more information on how to track offline conversions as well, take a look at our blog, Steps To Tracking Offline Conversions.
4. Click-Through-Rate
Reporting on an advertisement’s click-through-rate, often abbreviated as CTR, can prove to be valuable, especially in comparison to clicks. The CTR can be found by dividing the total number of clicks your ad or campaign received by your total number of impressions. This PPC metric is important to pay attention to because it can show you how well your advertisements are resonating with your audience, meaning that you are targeting the right people.
If you aren’t sure how to define your target audience, our blog The Anatomy Of A Buyer Persona can help!
5. Conversions/Conversion Rate
Conversions represent the desired actions that your business wants its target audience to take, which should be defined in your objectives. Tracking this KPI allows you to measure your success and identify points of weakness that require improvement. Optimizing or improving your ads can improve your conversion rate, which can greatly increase the value of your ad spend and better help you achieve your goals.
6. Cost Per Conversion/Acquisition (CPA)
Converting leads and acquiring customers is typically a primary objective in any PPC campaign. But, are the conversions worth how much you are spending on them? To answer this, you are going to need to look at your CPA, or cost-per-conversion. This PPC metric is valuable because it shows you how much you are spending to acquire a new customer. To find this KPI, divide the total cost by your total number of conversions. From there, you can decide if the acquisition is worth the cost, if you need to look to improve what you are doing, or maybe even try a new approach.
7. Keyword Performance
PPC campaigns should always look to utilize specific keywords that will direct customers right to your paid ads through their online searches. Once you implement specific keywords to drive search traffic to your advertisements, it is important that you continue to monitor this PPC metric to ensure that you are optimizing your SEO to reach your target audience. Looking at keyword performance provides insight into which keywords are worth investing in and which you should not allocate your ad spend toward.
To see how SEO and PPC specifically work together, check out SEM, SEO, PPC: How Do They Relate?
8. Impression Share
As stated above, impressions are the number of times your advertisements were served and seen. Knowing this number is important in finding other PPC metrics, like Impression Share, which takes this KPI a step further by showing the percentage of impressions your specific ad has seen on a search network.
You can find this by taking the percentage of impressions you have received on the search network, divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive. This information is useful in showing you if your ad campaigns aren’t generating the amount of potential traffic and conversions that they could be.
9. Bounce Rate
A primary reason why you may choose to execute a PPC campaign in the first place is to bring traffic to your website. That being said, you probably don’t want visitors coming to your site without interacting with any of your content.
Your website’s bounce rate is the percentage indicating how many visitors came to your site, but exited before navigating to any other pages. While a high bounce rate can be positive in certain circumstances, it more commonly means that people were not interested enough to look further around your website. This could indicate that people could not find what they were looking for, or that they had a poor user experience. If this is the case, it may be time to reevaluate your website.
In order to take full advantage of your PPC campaign, you should ensure that your website provides a positive user experience that delights visitors after they click on your ad.
Ready to Launch?
A PPC campaign is not nearly as effective without conducting proper reporting. Monitoring KPIs allows you to stay aware of your campaign’s performance and make any needed changes to get the most out of your ad spend.
Now that you have an understanding of the most important PPC metrics you should be tracking during your paid search campaigns, it’s time to begin defining your objectives and preparing to launch your campaign. If you aren’t sure exactly where to start, sign up for a free strategy session with us and we can help you begin!