Using PPC Metrics To Optimise Future Campaigns
If you’re not leveraging PPC metrics to inform and adjust your campaigns, then you’re wasting valuable opportunities for improvement and greater ROI.
Actionable insights play a key role in making informed adjustments to your ads targeting, bidding strategy and content. By using this data-driven power, businesses can achieve higher conversion rates and results from PPC campaigns, without increasing the budget.
In this article, we’ll take a look at which metrics you should be tracking, and how to use them to make your PPC campaigns stronger than ever.
Understanding PPC Metrics
PPC campaigns offer a wide variety of metrics to analyse; however, analysing all of them is timely and inefficient. Instead, it’s important to identify the metrics that will provide the best insights for improving your campaigns and lowering your overall costs for greater ROI.
Conversion rate
Conversion rates are determined by how many people followed through to conversion vs. how many visited your site from your PPC ad.
If 100 people visited your site and 10 converted for example, your conversion rate would be 10%. The higher your conversion rate, the more effective your PPC campaign is.
Cost-per-conversion
The cost-per-conversion rate is calculated by ascertaining just how much of your PPC campaign budget went into achieving each individual conversion.
To return to the 100 people example; if you put a £1000 budget on the campaign and got 10 conversions, each conversion cost £100.
Cost-per-click (CPC)
As it says on the tin, CPC measures how much a company pays each time a user clicks on its ad. In Google Ads, for example, a business will bid on specific keywords, setting a maximum CPC they are willing to pay.
On social media, this PPC metric is often determined by audience demographic, ad format, quality and competition.
CPC directly impacts ROI, so the lower the CPC that can be achieved, the better. This can be achieved by improving an ad’s content, imagery and targeting, based on insights that maximise the impact of the PPC budget.
Clickthrough rate (CTR)
Clickthrough rates are the percentage of people who click on an advert after seeing it, whether on social, Google, Display etc. It is calculated by dividing the number of clicks on an ad by how many times the ad was shown, then multiplying the result by 100.
The higher the CTR, the more relevant and engaging your ad is considered to be. This PPC metric allows you to measure the effectiveness of your ads in resonating with the target audience and encouraging them to take action.
Quality Score
Google will give your keywords a Quality Score between 1 – 10 based on how effectively it performs compared to competitors.
This is determined by ad relevance, expected clickthrough rates and landing page experience. In essence, how closely related is its content to the user intent?
The higher the quality score, the higher Google ranks your ad’s content, making it more likely it will receive better placement at a lower cost. If your Quality Score is below 7, it’s time to reassess and see which elements of the ad are causing it to drop in score. From there, you can target low-performing elements and adjust to improve your Quality Score and ROI.
The Importance of Data-Driven Decision Making
Historical data analysis informs future choices by providing actionable data-driven insights. By looking at how a keyword has performed year on year, for example, you can make educated assumptions about how it will continue to perform, and the expected cost-per-click for your campaign to place well.
As well as seeing shifts in performance, historical data analysis also provides insights into patterns and trends over the course of a year, or multiple years. If, for example, a real estate company notices a drop in clickthroughs during the winter months over 5 years, then it’s a relatively safe assumption that this trend will continue during those months in a future campaign.
This allows you to change the budget accordingly, funnelling the funds toward higher-performing months so as to compete at the right times.
By analysing historical data this way, you can make changes to PPC budget allocation and adjust expectations according to the patterns observed in previous years. These insights mean you’re effectively choosing when and where to adjust placements for better ROI without increasing funds.
Setting Performance Benchmarks
Using the historical analysis data, you can set performance benchmarks and KPIs that assess the success of the PPC campaign based on industry standards. It’s important to regularly monitor the overall performance and continually improve your ads to tighten and refine your targeting, ad content and overall PPC strategy.
The historical data analysis allows you to prepare for trends that reoccur over time, and evaluate the current campaign’s success rates based on previous metrics. Looking at industry standards allows you to see how competitors are performing and take advantage of any gaps in the market.
Setting these performance benchmarks allows you to see if a campaign is on track, comparing well to industry averages, and succeeding against its competitors. If your ads aren’t hitting those metrics indicated by historical performance data, this should provide actionable insights as to why, so you can refine the ad accordingly.
Comparing campaigns to these benchmarks allows you to contextualise ads against others, set achievable goals, and prepare for shifting patterns and trends.
Using Metrics to Identify Opportunities
It’s all well and good having these PPC metrics to hand, but they’re meaningless without actually using them to drive informed change. The PPC metrics measured should include actionable insights for improving ads and maximising ROI without increasing the budget.
Beyond the traditional measurements like clickthrough rates, cost-per-acquisition etc. there are other important PPC metrics that can offer invaluable insights.
Search query reports
Search query reports in Google Ads provide information on which keywords are used, and how closely they align with your content. Establishing user intent this way provides analysis on how closely search patterns match ad content across audience segments, and which keywords are driving success for budget optimisation.
Using it, you can establish a more nuanced approach to the campaign and identify long-tail keywords that drive the right audience segments to your business; as well as identifying negative keywords that are causing wasted spend.
Device performance
Different devices drive different user intent and success rates. A B2B SaaS company, for example, is unlikely to see a high volume of quality conversions through mobile compared to desktop. If this is the case, you should use automated bidding to adjust strategies to target desktop devices instead.
Seeing which devices are performing best also informs the type of ad you deliver to the user. A mobile user, looking at a social PPC ad may just want quick-fire information and snappy messaging. Someone on a desktop, on the other hand, is more likely to respond to a more detailed Google ad that has sitelink extensions and more contextual copy in it.
Geographic data
Location, location, location. Geographic data allows insights into regional differences in behaviour and user intent. You can also identify areas of potential opportunity, not being targeted by competitors and take advantage of any gaps in the market.
For example, we helped Riverbank IT Management with a new campaign focused on Oxford, analysing the local market to find targeting opportunities. In doing so, we increased traffic by 42.36% year-on-year.
Testing and Iteration
The most successful PPC campaigns are ones that are constantly monitored and adjusted in line with new insights and data. This iterative approach allows for gradual, granular optimisation that strengthens your overall campaign success. Don’t be afraid to test different strategies and approaches to identify the most effective for your business.
Three key tests for a refined campaign are:
A/B Testing: compare different version of ad content, copy and/or landing pages to see which performs best. By mixing and matching different elements like call-to-actions and ad copy, you can more easily identify which combinations are most successful.
Ad experiments: Instead of granularly focusing on individual ads, try experimenting with the campaign on a larger scale. This could be by using automated bidding, adjusting targeting or changing ad formats to see the impact on overall success rates and ROI.
Landing pages: Landing page tests focus on the “what happens next” stage. The consumer has already clicked through to your content, but the landing page needs to effectively sell the next step. Testing different variations of design and content of the page provides analysis on which your audience responds best to.
Implementing Optimisation Strategies
Once you’ve established which areas to target, you can optimise your PPC campaigns to maximise success rates and conversions.
In order to do this, each element of the campaign should be considered. Test different text, call-to-actions and persuasive messaging to see which resonates best with the audience. Use established PPC metrics to adjust targeting and audience segmentation based on user behaviour.
These, coupled with trying different bidding strategies and targeting high-performing keywords should improve effectiveness without requiring a higher budget.
Campaigns should have clear KPIs and expected outcomes, so adjustments should reflect that intent. If certain keywords have low clickthrough rates, or a certain demographic isn’t engaging as well, then the campaign should be adjusted accordingly with refined targeting and more relevant keywords.
Understanding your ad groups and how they perform is a key part of this.
A well organised ad account, like Alfresco’s after we helped them organise their Google Ads, makes it easier to spot opportunities for improvement and make data-driven choices for optimisation. The result? 162% increase in paid traffic conversion.
Monitoring and adjustment
Remember that the continual monitoring shouldn’t just be of the campaign itself, but the wider marketing world around it. You need to be able to adjust to real-time shifts and trends in order to capitalise on opportunities, and only checking your campaign once a quarter won’t cut it.
The best PPC campaigns are ones that are regularly reviewed, ideally weekly, or even daily where possible. Management of this can be fiddly, however, so external third-party analytics dashboards like Agency Analytics can help consolidate your analytics with customised reports.
The more interlinked your analytics platforms are, from social, to Google Ads, to Google Analytics, to your CRM, the more accurate and consistent the data and insights will be. This streamlines monitoring, making it easier to identify areas for improvement.
Use these insights to adjust different ad elements and targeting, and always keep an eye on the competition to see if there are any changes you should be making.
If you’re continually tracking your campaign’s success rate and testing different strategies and ad types, your campaign should be efficient and well-run.
Concluding Remarks
When looking at how to optimise PPC campaigns, metrics are key in providing data-driven, actionable insights. By analysing not only clickthrough rates, conversions and cost-per-acquisition, but also taking into account demographics, segmentation, bidding strategies, locations and devices, a business can more granularly refine its strategy for greater ROI.
Continual monitoring of PPC metrics allows businesses to react in real-time to changes and shifts in the market. Ultimately, it will make campaigns more refined and targeted, providing key stakeholders with evidence-driven results that hit KPIs and achieve the maximum ROI, without increasing budget allocation.
Using PPC metrics to optimise future campaigns overall results in greater success, leading to enhanced performance and sustained growth.