The Google Ads KPIs You Should Really Be Tracking

Ensuring that your digital marketing strategy is up to scratch means getting to know the platforms that you’re using, as well as the metrics by which you define your success. If you’re looking at just one metric, be it clicks or conversions, to see how well your marketing methods are doing, then you’re not getting a full picture. To make sure you get a full picture when using Google ads, here are some of the KPIs you must be focusing on.

Click-through Rate

Let’s make the assumption that we don’t need to explain what clicks are. But what about your click-through rate? Your CTR is the rate at how often people see your ad and click it. For instance, if you get 10 clicks per 1000 impressions, that’s a CTR of 1%. Focus not just on how many clicks you are getting, but how many times your ad has to be seen before someone will click it to measure the effectiveness of the ad itself.

Conversions

Often the true “aim” of the ads, conversions are a measure of how many people not only click your ads but then go on to become a customer. When it comes to figuring out your return on investment, you want to get an idea of the cost per conversion. How much of your budget do you spend for each conversion and how much are you likely to make from each conversion? That’s how you get a true sense of return on investment in advertising.

Cost Per Click

In pay per click advertising, you work with a predetermined budget, which you spend bidding on ad slots. The harder your ad has to work to reach your audience, the higher the cost per click, or CPC, is going to be. There are a lot of ways to lower your CPC, however, from ensuring a proper keyword strategy to improving the quality score of your ad copy.

Quality score

This is not a figure derived specifically from the numbers in how your ad performs. Rather, this is a metric that is determined by the Google Ad platform. Google will prioritize ads that have a higher quality score meaning that if there are two ads that have the same bid on the same keyword, the one with the higher quality score might get it. Improve the quality score if your ads aren’t getting high marks.

Average position

While Google ads are often used to skip to the top of the search engine results page, they still have to compete for the top spot, albeit with fewer competitors than through natural SEO. To make sure you’re likely to get more clicks, work to get an average position of number 1. To get it, you might need to raise the budget per ad or to target keywords more specifically, for instance.

With the KPIs mentioned above, you can get a much more complete picture of how truly effective your ads are, and what you can do to improve them even further. Make sure you’re tracking all of them.

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