Now that you’ve put in the time and effort to create a paid search campaign, what should you do? It’s time to keep an eye on things and see how well your strategy works out. First, you must determine your campaign’s purpose and the specific outcomes you seek before you can consider your strategy a success.
What is the purpose of your campaign?
Companies can pay to have their ads featured prominently in search engine results by using paid search advertising. It’s a useful resource for getting the job done in the workplace.
When you have clear objectives for your paid search campaign, you can ignore the fluff and concentrate on what matters. It’s unrealistic to expect to realize all of one’s dreams in a single lifetime, and doing so may actually be counterproductive.
So, it’s important to set goals that are attainable and keep track of your progress toward them. By keeping an eye on how your campaign is doing and making changes as needed, you can improve your strategy and get the most out of your investment. Focus on the metrics that are most important to your business, such as click-through rates, conversion rates, and cost per acquisition.
With a well-planned and well-executed paid search campaign, you can drive targeted traffic to your website, generate leads, and ultimately increase your bottom line.
Learn how to measure campaign success.
Some businesses may use paid search as a branding tool to ensure that their brand is the first thing consumers think of when they need a product or service. Bidding on branded keywords and creating ads that highlight the company’s unique selling points are part of this strategy. While this may not result in immediate conversions, it can help build brand awareness and recognition over time.
Through the use of paid search, some businesses are able to direct interested website visitors to a lead capture form where they can provide their contact details in exchange for further information about the business.
No matter your motivation for using paid search, it is essential to track relevant metrics to determine if your campaigns are actually producing the desired outcomes. To know what metrics to track for your paid search ads, you need to have a firm grasp of the reason(s) your company is using them in the first place.
Determine which metric to prioritize
It’s important to consider the end goal when planning a marketing campaign for a specific product. When you know why you’re running this campaign, you can track the right metrics to see how well it’s doing.
Let’s take a closer look at the three KPIs for paid search that really matter.
Click-through rate
The click-through rate (CTR) is the proportion of people who were exposed to your advertisement and followed through by clicking for more details or further action, such as visiting your website. How the CTR is determined is as follows:
(Clicks / Impressions) x 100] = CTR
Because clicks form the backbone of most digital marketing analytics, knowing your current standing is crucial. How many times your ad was clicked on after being displayed in a user’s search results or as part of a display Network placement.
This is a fantastic measure of the quality and usefulness of your advertisements. People are more likely to become leads or customers if they interact with an ad the way it was intended to be interacted with.
There’s more to it than just the clickthrough rate. If your CTR is low but you still receive many clicks, you may want to consider bidding more for placements that generate clicks and less for those that generate few clicks.
Cost Per Click
Another metric for paid search that incorporates “clicks” is the cost-per-click (CPC). How to figure out your CTR is as follows:
(ad spend / impressions) x 100 = CPC
When comparing paid search performance to other marketing channels, such as email or social media, cost-per-click is a common metric used to gauge success. It details the price tag attached to each ad click. If you let this metric rise too high, you’ll quickly exhaust your advertising budget and be unable to reach as many people as possible.
Conversion Rate
The success of your paid search campaigns as a whole can be gauged by looking at the conversion rate. It’s the number of people who visit a site or page and go on to do something useful there, like buy something, sign up for a newsletter, download something, or sign up for an account.
The conversion rate is found by dividing the total number of ad interactions by the number of conversions.
(total attributed conversion / total # of clicks or visits) x 100 = conversion rate (%25)
It’s a simple metric that helps us evaluate the success of our campaigns and gives advertisers insight into the effectiveness of their ads. You may need to make adjustments to your ad copy, landing pages, and other aspects of your campaign if your conversion rate is low.
Negative keyword management refers to the practice of optimizing for your keywords while also bidding on other terms that are relevant to the search query but are not included in your ad group.
To keep your ads relevant, it is important to keep an eye on your negative keyword management. Make sure the page people are taken to after clicking your ad is relevant; you don’t want to lose them or send them to a 404.
Return on Ad Spend
An excellent metric for gauging a campaign’s success is return on ad spend (ROAS). It’s a good indicator of whether or not a campaign needs to be scaled back, as it measures the efficacy of each dollar spent. ROI is calculated by dividing the revenue generated by an advertising campaign by the total amount spent on that campaign.
Calculate your Return on Ad Spend this way:
(total campaign revenue / total campaign costs) x 100 = return on ad spend
You might conclude that more money always means better results if you only consider this one factor. However, there are many factors that actually influence the success of any campaign. You can better gauge the success of your paid search campaigns by calculating ROAS in conjunction with other metrics like gross revenue and total costs (including marketing and customer acquisition costs).
What Metrics Should You Track?
More metrics than we can list here are available for monitoring the success of your paid search campaigns. Your campaign’s goals, audience, and desired insights will determine the best ones to follow.
These figures can become very costly for your company if you are monitoring the wrong metrics.
Keep in mind that the best metrics to track will be determined after you have established your campaign’s goals and defined success.
