Which Paid Metrics To Focus On?

One of the good things about paid search is that the incontrovertible fact that you'll track everything. If someone visits your store after seeing your billboard or TV spot, there’s no possible way to trace that.

However, if someone sees your paid search ad and visits your website, you recognize how they need your site. You recognize which ad they saw, what copy they skilled, and even what search term triggered your ad.

All of this information is often a touch overwhelming. There’s such a lot of data that it is often hard to work out what it all means or what to try and do with it. Impression counts, clickthrough rates, cost-per-click…how does one sort through it all and use your paid search metrics to form intelligent decisions?

I mean, what’s the purpose of getting all of that data if you don’t know what to try and do with it?

To make matters worse, tons of this data is often hard to properly interpret, so even experienced online marketers often draw incorrect conclusions from their data or specialise in the incorrect metrics in their accounts. So, if you’ve ever stared at your paid search account and wondered, “What am I missing?”, this text is for you.

Are You Focused On The Correct Paid Search Metrics?

Paid search is pretty complex. If you’re like most online marketers, you almost certainly have several campaigns running, a minimum of a dozen ads, and over 100 keywords to stay track of. And that’s if your account is on the tiny side.

Every one of these campaigns, ads, ad groups, and keywords can offer you a wealth of data about your audience and the way effective your advertising is…but as long as you recognize the way to use your data.

These days, paid search is so competitive that it isn’t enough to easily found out Google Analytics and keep an eye fixed on your cost-per-click. You would want to understand the way to interpret every aspect of your paid search data and use it to optimize the performance of your account.

Now, while which may sound sort of a daunting task, most of the knowledge in your paid search account is often weakened into three manageable pieces: information about your traffic, information about conversions, and knowledge about sales.

Let’s take a glance at each of those three sorts of data and the way you'll use them to interpret what’s happening in your paid search account.

What kind of traffic are you getting?

When it involves paid search advertising, most marketers tend to specialise in traffic-related metrics like impressions, cost-per-click (CPC), or clickthrough-rate (CTR). This is sensible . After all, the most reason why you run paid search campaigns is to drive more traffic to your website.

And, not surprisingly, paid search platforms like Google Ads and Bing Ads are filled with traffic-related information: device segmentation data, keyword info, impression share insights, and more. For Google and Bing, this info is incredibly easy to trace and provide and it’s what most of their users have an interest in.

What you'll learn from traffic data

While all of this traffic data is certainly handy, it’s only useful if you recognize what to try and do with it. That being said, your traffic data tells you tons about how well your campaigns are working for your audience .

If nobody is clicking on your ads, there’s an honest chance that your ad copy needs some work…or you’re targeting the incorrect keywords. If your cost-per-click is just too high, you would possibly got to rethink your bidding strategy. If you’re not getting enough impression share on your best campaigns, you almost certainly got to consider shifting your budget around.

For example, say you’re running paid search ads for an area attorney. On average , this client makes $3,200 from a replacement client and spends about $1,200 taking care of them.

In your most up-to-date review of your campaigns, you review your traffic data and put the subsequent report together:

From the info above, it’s easy to ascertain which campaign is generating the simplest results. Campaign #3 produces more clicks at a lower cost-per-click than any of your other campaigns. In contrast, while you spent over twice the maximum amount on campaign #4, you bought one-third of the clicks you bought from campaign #3.

Clearly, you either got to pack up campaign #4 and put its budget into a far better campaign like #3 or invest a while into deciding why campaign #4 is performing so poorly.

However, before you create any decisions, we should always probably mention the opposite two sorts of data in your account. After all, your attorney friend doesn’t make money off of clicks. To make money, she needs leads…and none of this data tells you whether or not all of these clicks are literally turning into leads.

Is your traffic converting?

So, thereupon in mind, let’s mention conversion data. Because Google and Bing often can’t tell what a conversion is for your website, it takes some extra work to line up conversion tracking for your site.

And, as a result, almost half paid search advertisers don’t track their campaigns beyond traffic data.

But here’s the thing, without conversion data, you can’t answer the subsequent two critical questions on your paid search campaigns.

1. Is my website (or landing page) an honest fit for my traffic?

Paid search marketing is intent-based marketing. In other words, when someone searches for something on Google or Bing and clicks on your ad, they’re actively trying to find an answer to a problem…a problem they think your business can help them with.

Their click is an act of religion in your business and therefore the page they land on after clicking shows them whether or not their faith was justified. If your landing page or website meets their expectations, an honest percentage of individuals should convert. If not, they’ll leave.

So, if your conversion rate is high, then your destination page may be a good fit your traffic. However, if your conversion rate is low, it means something is off. Your landing page or site aren’t working for your traffic, so they’re leaving to seek out something better.

If you discover yourself within the latter situation, you'll want to require a tough check out the page you’re sending traffic to. You'll have to rethink your page and site experience to bring it into closer alignment with the expectations of your traffic.

2. Is your traffic an honest fit for your landing page?

Of course, the other could be true, too. If your landing page looks like it should be converting traffic, but it isn’t, your ads could also be sending the incorrect people to your page.

If people click on your ads because they need a divorce attorney, but you’re a private injury firm, will they convert? No, never! The wrong traffic never converts, no matter how good your site is.

In this situation, it’s often an honest idea to seem at the search terms people are using to seek out your ads and therefore the actual ad copy that you’re using. If it looks like you’re attracting clicks from the incorrect people, you'll get to rework your advertising strategy to focus on the proper audience.

So, because you’re a sensible marketer who has found out conversion tracking, you opt to seem beyond traffic data and see how your campaigns did in terms of conversions.

Everything still looks pretty good. Although it doesn’t have the most effective conversion rate (CR), campaign #3 gets enough cheap clicks that it still has the most effective cost-per-lead. And, as before, campaign #4 remains a campaign . Between a low conversion rate and high cost-per-click, it’s producing leads at almost ten times the value of a lead from campaign #3.

With an 8 percent conversion rate, it doesn’t appear to be either of those campaigns are targeting the incorrect traffic, but they might probably both enjoy a bit of conversion rate optimization on their destination pages.

However, while this data paints a clearer picture, your attorney friend still doesn’t make money off of leads. She must close new clients. To get at that information, we'd like to seem at our sales data.

Are you making sales?

As helpful as traffic and conversion data are, they still don’t tell you whether or not your campaigns are making money. And, if your campaigns aren’t making money, why are you running them?

Unfortunately, tracking your paid search campaigns clear through to sales data are often downright tricky. Ecommerce is pretty straightforward, but once you get beyond that, it are often hard to attach your actual sales data to your campaign performance. You regularly need some kind of CRM like Salesforce and you've got to work out the way to connect all of the dots.

But is it worth it? Absolutely. Let’s take a glance at what the sales data for our hypothetical law firm’s campaigns shows.

All of sudden, campaign #4 just went from zero to hero. It might not have an excellent CPC or conversion rate, but its return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) is nearly twice the ROAS of the other campaign.

So what does this actually tell us? Well, for one thing, it’s clear that campaign #4 appeals to people that are far more likely to shop for than the people in any of the opposite campaigns. Campaign #3 might drive tons more traffic, but that traffic is way less likely to check in for our attorney friend’s services.

Does this mean that campaign #3 is bad? With a ROAS of 92 percent, its certainly losing money immediately , but it's tons going for it on the traffic and data front. Before you'll pass judgment thereon , you’ll got to dive into that data and see if there's any thanks to turn all of that potential into actual sales.

Maybe you would like to vary your ad messaging to filter people that aren’t likely to truly become a client. Maybe you'll tweak the landing page to raised appeal to potential clients. Maybe your attorney friend just needs some coaching on the way to answer leads from this campaign.

In any case, without this sales data, it might are easy to assume that campaign #4 was an entire loss and campaign #3 deserved more of your budget—when, in fact, the other was actually true. This is often why sales data is so important. Traffic and conversion data teach you useful things about your campaigns, but only sales data answers the question, “Are my ads actually making money?”

Conclusion

Your paid search account is filled with valuable information, but turning all of that data into actionable information can sometimes seem overwhelming. The trick is ensuring that you have access to all or any of the data that you got to make educated decisions than knowing what each sort of data tells you.

Now that you simply skills to interpret your data, all you've got to try and do is start digging through your paid search metrics. Opportunities to enhance your account should quickly become apparent. Good luck!

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