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If you’re considering entering the paid advertising space, and are wondering how to go about marketing your business; rest assured, your anguish ends here. Here’s a complete guide on Paid Marketing Campaign (Pay Per Click) with concrete metrics and resources to equip you with all that you need to know.
While 45% of small businesses do some form of online advertising, pay-per-click is still an unfamiliar concept to many.
Thankfully, the biggest advantage of digital marketing is that it lets you measure almost every single marketing exercise and helps you refine strategies based on the outcome.
That is one of the reasons why PPC has gained popularity, as it allows you to channelize when and where your money is being spent. It is a great way to get your product or service in front of a targeted audience
The term "paid marketing" refers to any form of digital advertising that you pay for, including:
- Instagram Ads
- Twitter Ads
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is an online advertising model where advertisers pay a fee each time someone clicks on their ad. Basically, you're paying to get visitors to your site rather than earning them organically.
PPC campaigns can be used to drive traffic to your website, create brand awareness, generate qualified leads, grow your email list or even boost social media engagement . PPC campaigns are also used by eCommerce businesses to retarget their customers and encourage them to return to the site.
Search engine results pages, like Google and Bing, are one of the most common places for pay-per-click advertising, but social media channels are also popular.
PPC metrics can provide instant ROI when monitored and tracked properly, Let’s look at the metrics you should be keeping a tab on.
Advertisers use this metric to determine how many times their ad is being shown to potential customers. Ad impressions is a good indicator to know how much money you are spending on your campaigns and to drive brand awareness.
For example, if an advertiser wants to increase brand awareness for their product and uses Facebook ads, they can see how many times their ads were shown and use that information to determine which ads were most effective at getting people interested in their brand or product.
You can track ad impressions in google analytics by clicking on Behavior > Events > Top Events. You should see Advanced Ads in the Event Category list as soon as Google Analytics tracks ad impressions or clicks.
This metric becomes entirely useful when combined with CTR (click through rate) and CPM (cost per mille), which we will learn more in the next section.
Wouldn't it be nice to have a single dashboard that summarizes all your marketing efforts in one place? Check out Dataflo’s pre-built customizable dashboard for monitoring and evaluating the success of your paid marketing efforts across all your ad campaigns.
What if you get common values for Impressions, Clicks, CTR, CPC etc. for your multiple ad campaigns all under one roof?
Dataflo simplifies your paid advertising reporting with this feature. You don’t have to depend on often messy, time-consuming spreadsheets to track the most important KPIs/ metrics. No more logging into multiple accounts or hopping between different tools in the tech stack to check how your accounts on different channels are performing, or compiling a comprehensive report that seems to take eternity.
Now you can view your Facebook, Twitter and other social media performance metrics in one place.
Get started by following these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Get our pre-built template
Step 2: Connect and integrate your PPC accounts with Dataflo
Step 3: In seconds, your dashboard will be ready to use
Ad clicks are perhaps the most basic metric of all. Ad clicks are simply the number of individuals who clicked on your ad to visit your online resource (website, landing pages etc.,). The more ad clicks you get, the more people are seeing your ads.
If you have low ad click numbers, it could be due to poor placement or targeting, which means you need to make some changes in this area or accept that you're not going to get a lot of traffic from PPC advertising alone.
Ad clicks can be tracked per keyword or per campaign. You need to decide which is more important for your business — whether you want to see how many times a single keyword has been clicked or whether you want to see how many times all of your keywords have been clicked together in one month (or week).
You can track ad clicks as part of an overall conversion rate for your website (for example, if every visitor who has seen at least one of your ads converts into a sale). That way, you can see what percentage of visitors who saw an ad actually bought something from you after visiting the site.
CPC stands for cost per click, which is the cost of a single click on an ad. It is one of the most important metrics in digital marketing because it measures how much you are spending to generate leads or sales.
You can also use CPC as a benchmark to compare your performance against competitors and see how much they are spending on their ads.
CPC is used as a metric because it gives an idea of how much your campaign is costing you in terms of revenue. The higher the CPC, the more expensive it becomes for you to acquire new customers.
To understand how CPC is relevant, let’s take an example. Say you have a digital marketing campaign running on Google AdWords and the ads are being clicked on by users at an average rate of $0.50 each time. This means that for every 100 clicks on your ad, you are spending $50 on your advertising budget. If there are 100 people who visit your website from this campaign, then you can say that each visitor costs you $0.50 per visitor (or CPC).
Knowing how much you spend will help increase your ROI and make sure that each dollar invested generates maximum returns over time.
To measure average CPC you will be using the following formula:
Total CPC / Total Clicks = Average CPC
CTR stands for click-through rate. It’s the number of times people click on your ad divided by the total number of impressions your ad received.
Clicks ÷ Impressions = CTR
5,000 (clicks) ÷ 100,000 (impressions) = 5.0% CTR
If you have a good CTR or Click through rate, it means that your customers are finding value in what you are offering and are ready to try your product/services. From a marketing campaign perspective, it means that your ad is relevant to the searcher who is looking for a solution.
In short, CTR helps you determine how effective your ad campaign is. You also have an idea of who those users are (or at least where they live). This information can be used by other departments within your company to improve customer service or develop new products that meet customer needs.
Conversions are the holy grail of any business. You do all the heavy lifting only to get people to click on your ad, and then what? Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that take a specific action on your website.
An important metric that tells you how well your campaign is performing against its goal. The types of conversions depend on the nature of the business - for an ecommerce site conversion is straightforward and equals to buying a product, while for a b2b business it could be generating leads by nudging them to download an e-book or make the visitor fill a form.
Knowing your conversion rate can help you with a multitude of benefits ranging from -
This is how you can calculate your conversion for paid ads - take the number of conversions and divide it by the total number of ad interactions that lead to conversions.
Ad interactions in this sense can refer to - impressions, sessions or visitors. So all the three formulas will apply to calculate your conversion.
You can track and report these conversions both in google ads or via google analytics.
Here is the Google benchmark for average conversion rate
There are a number of factors that determine the success of your PPC advertising campaign, but by focusing on these four you can achieve great results:
Keyword Relevance: PPC keyword lists that are relevant, tight keyword groups, and appropriate ad text are crucial.
Landing Page Quality: Create landing pages tailored to specific search queries with compelling content and a clear call-to-action.
Quality Score: PPC campaigns, landing pages, and keywords are rated by Quality Score by Google. More ad clicks are attributed to advertisers with better Quality Scores.
Creative Copy: You need interesting ad copy when advertising on display networks.
Once you've created your new campaigns, you'll need to manage them regularly to make sure they continue to be effective. To increase the chances of your campaign’s success, keep a close eye on how they're performing and make adjustments as needed.
The above PPC metrics can be used effectively to optimize your marketing campaigns and give you an edge over your competitors.
Paid advertising has always had its pitfalls, but the rise of new metrics makes it easier to fine-tune a campaign. These metrics themselves bring a new perspective to the analysis of your advertising initiatives. Thus by gaining insights about the impact of different metrics, you will be better prepared for future ad campaigns.
Santhoshi is a content marketer turned product marketer. When she's not thinking about marketing, she's thinking about her 6-year-old daughter and what to make for dinner for the second night in a row (she's an avid vegetarian). She loves writing, Netflix, reading, and spending time with her sprightly 6-year-old. She loves her coffee strong!
