Although the world of online marketing and SEO can be extremely complex, and most businesses need professional help to make the most of their online spend, there’s no denying the benefits of having advanced tracking and metrics capabilities at your fingertips. You can literally follow your customers from the moment they click a PPC ad through making a purchase and analyze everything they do, in order to improve their shopping experience.
Of course, when it comes to PPC, there are so many metrics to track that you may be understandably overwhelmed. With limited resources, you naturally have to be choosy about what you spend your time and money on, and this means narrowing the scope of metrics you track and analyze. Which metrics should you focus on?
While there’s no single formula, and companies will have different goals and expectations when it comes to the outcomes of their PPC campaigns, there are a few important metrics every business should track. Here are the key metrics you should always have on your radar.
Traffic
Traffic is not the be-all and end-all of PPC, but it’s certainly relevant to your efforts. Sure, visibility, awareness, and brand building are all tied into any form of advertising, but PPC is literally designed to get clicks and bring traffic to your site, so if you’re not paying attention to whether or not there’s an uptick in traffic, you’re missing an opportunity to gauge how your ads are performing.
Conversions
It’s not enough to get people in the door – you need to wow them. If you see a big boost to traffic, but no accompanying boost to sales or other conversions like signing up for membership, following social media, and so on, you learn something important. Your ads are doing their job and funneling users to your site, but somewhere along the way, your messaging is getting lost, likely on landing pages, and this gives you valuable information you need to improve the user experience and conversions.
ROAS
How does your spending translate into returns? If your traffic is high and you’re seeing conversions, the next thing you need to know is how sales equate to these other metrics. You always want to get the most bang for your buck, and ROAS helps you to understand what you gain, dollar for dollar, when you spend on PPC.
Comprehensive Analysis
The real reason to track each of these metrics is for the purposes of cross-comparison. Seeing an uptick in traffic alone won’t tell you a lot, but when you compare it to intended conversions, you can start to get a clearer picture of the overall success of your campaign. After all, you definitely want clicks, but you also want to use that opportunity to compel visitors to complete specific actions.
When you add in returns on advertising spend, you can start to gain insight into how well one PPC campaign is performing compared to others, helping you to hone your strategies in the future and get more bang from every buck, so to speak. The end goal with tracking metrics is really to engineer minimal spend and maximum returns with your PPC campaigns, and to do this you need to focus on comprehensive analysis of key metrics.
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