What makes advertising successful? According to experts, it’s all about matching your promotion to the intent of your target users. That’s also one of the main reasons why tons of business owners go with reliable SEO companies to get a reliable boost of traffic.
Intent can be tricky and hard to measure but today’s digital ad landscape allows advertisers and marketers like web development services providers or content agencies to leverage user data and match their promotions with the people who want and need it most.
Maybe there’s no better platform than Google AdWords. Even though Facebook Ads can match Google when it comes to the number of user data that they can monetize, Google still has the best search query. From Rand Fishkin of Sparktoro, Google has 62.6% of the share of web searchers as of February 2018.
When it comes to user intent, the most powerful indicator is what users are searching for. There’s no other more powerful ad platform than Google AdWords regarding matching a promotion with user intent. And guess what? Databox users agree with this. According to data, AdWords is the most-used advertising platform out of all the other platforms out there such as Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, or Bing Ads.
To give you a better understanding of which metrics are the best to track, we’ve listed the “must know” metrics in Google Ads.
Impressions
Whenever your ad is shown on the search result page of the Google Network or Google, this is counted as an impression. In a nutshell, the number of times your ad is shown in the SERPs is the impression. With the color-coded decrease and increase in your account overview, you can easily see if your impressions increased or not. Recommended data block for this is to set the time frame to last month so you can check the overall Adwords health.
Cost
Cost is the amount of money you have spent on your ad campaign. Use the daily line graph to get the best data. It’s nice to add this to your graphical interface. Here’s a tip. Track and view your campaign, account, ad group and keyword blocks’ cost data. Use these to calculate the cost-per-acquisition (CPA).
Clicks
When someone clicks on your ads blue, linked text, it’s recorded as one click. Now, you should know that whenever someone clicks on your ad and can’t reach your website because of wifi issues or 404 error, it will still be logged as a click. The recommended data block for this is a daily line graph and turn on the comparisons.
Average CPC
The Average CPC is the average that you have been charged for every click on your ad campaign. How is this calculated? It’s by dividing the cost of your clicks by the total number of clicks. Turn on your comparisons for the account overview as the recommended data block for this. And don’t forget to set the table block’s time frame to “month to date.” This way, you can quickly get an effective and clean display in your overview.
Conversion
When a user clicks on your ad and takes action, it’s counted as a conversion. It can be in the form of a visit to signup or a specific web page. It depends on what you have defined as necessary. Turn on the comparisons for your number block for this metric to get the best data.
Tracking for conversions are done graphically including by campaign, conversion rate and cost-per-acquisition (CPA).
Impressions by Campaign
We mentioned impressions previously, and now we’re adding it here again. The impressions by the campaign are the total impressions segregated by each of the AdWords campaigns you’ve got running. This is helpful to check so you can determine what keywords and subjects have the ad inventory and volume that is necessary to generate results. Turn on your comparisons for this. Set the blocks to last month so you can check the EOM reviews and to track live data, set Month to Date.
CTR by Ad Groups
What is an ad group? It’s merely a group of ads that are targeting a set of keywords. When it comes to CTR by Ad Group, we’re about the click-through-rate of your ad groups. We recommend your data block to be in table form.
The CTR by Ad Groups helps drill down the data collected from the CTR by the campaign. With this, you can easily find the ad group that’s low performing within your campaign. The data block can help identify which of the ads are clicking for the viewers.
CTR by Campaign
The click-through-rate that’s segmented by the campaign is the CTR by Campaign. You can use this to monitor the keywords, campaigns and ad groups that generate higher engagement. Use a table data block to get the best data. As for the timeframe, we recommend a month-to-date.
Cost Per Conversion
The average charge you receive for a conversion with your ad campaigns is what’s called the cost per conversion. You can calculate this by dividing the total number of conversions from the total cost of conversions.
You have to remember though that a conversion is an activity that you have set in your AdWords campaign to get essential business activities including signups and purchases. We recommend the number of the data block for this.
CTR
Lastly, we’ve been discussing click-through-rates, but it’s essential to add the CTR metric since it is the overall ratio on how often people see your ad and if they are clicking on it. You can calculate this by dividing the whole number of clicks your ad gets by the total impressions. Recommended data block for this is account overview.
All in all, the account overview data block is the first look at your CTR. Have a clean and comfortable to read an overview of every one of your metrics. This gives you a glance into your Adwords campaign performance. And if you want to, you can view your CTR data in a simpler Number Datablock.
Takeaway
Ads for your business are one of the best ways to make some money and increase your traffic as well as sales. But if you don’t know which metrics you should check, you could be missing out on making your ads better.
Interesting related article: “What is Search Engine Marketing?“