Whether you’re just starting with your initial search campaign or managing numerous campaigns, once you’ve initiated them, you’re likely already contemplating how to efficiently monitor and communicate the outcomes of your efforts.
Numerous metrics are available to evaluate PPC performance, and your choice depends on your business objectives.
Despite the abundance of data, here are suggestions to consider when it comes to monitoring PPC performance and extracting valuable insights.
Goals
Initiating any reporting process should be grounded in your primary and secondary objectives or the key performance indicators (KPIs) that hold significance for your company or client.
For instance, if your quarterly task involves boosting attributable revenue, sharing a report that highlights the year-to-date increase in landing page traffic won’t be particularly useful.
Consistently tracking results tied to a small set of one or two KPIs will carry the most significance for your stakeholders and facilitate the implementation of impactful optimizations over time. For the purpose of this article, let’s assume that your primary KPI is conversion volume, and your secondary KPI is conversion rate.
Metrics
Once you have established your KPIs, think about the important metrics to incorporate into your regular weekly or monthly performance evaluations.
If your main focus is on conversion volume, then conversions should take centre stage in your analysis, and your insights should revolve around conversion data. Meanwhile, the conversion rate serves as a secondary performance indicator.
For instance, if you notice a decrease in conversions but an increase in conversion rates, it’s an opportune moment to dig into your audience lists or regional targeting. This will help you identify which customer archetypes are responsible for the higher conversion rates or more qualified conversions.
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Pacing
In every performance recap or report, it’s crucial to include a section on budget management.
If you find that you’re on track to meet your primary objective (conversion volume) but consistently exceeding your daily or monthly budget limits, it might be prudent to consider requesting additional budget allocation for your paid search efforts.
This becomes especially relevant if your cost per conversion (which is a secondary goal in this context) is efficient when compared to previous periods or is not of significant concern to your stakeholders.
Conversely, if you’re falling behind your pacing targets and still achieving strong conversion volume, it’s a signal to explore growth opportunities through keyword expansion and other channel types. Alternatively, you could contemplate reducing your paid search budgets and reallocating resources to channels with higher scaling potential.
Bidding
In your performance analysis, your bid strategy is a valuable metric to incorporate, ideally aligning with your primary objective.
If you’re employing Maximize conversion bidding to achieve your conversion volume target, that’s excellent!
However, if you’re utilizing a bid strategy such as Target cost per acquisition (tCPA) or Target return on ad spend (tROAS), it’s essential to contemplate how adjusting your bid targets can assist you in attaining your goal.
While there may be valid reasons why your bid strategy may not perfectly align with your primary objective, it’s advisable to prioritize alignment as much as feasible.
Audiences
When evaluating and assessing your campaign’s performance, it’s valuable to consider the audience that will be interpreting the performance data.
If it’s just you and your team, you might generate a different level of reporting compared to what you’d present at a C-suite meeting or to your client’s top-level executives. Regardless of the audience, the primary focus should be on providing actionable insights that can be applied across various channels.
For instance, if one ad generates the highest number of conversions for the month, consider repurposing that copy for an email campaign or a Meta ad. As the resident expert, it falls upon you to break down PPC performance into manageable and actionable tasks for the broader team with whom you’re sharing data.
Avoid inundating your audience with unfamiliar acronyms or complex insights that may leave them bewildered, such as:
- CPCs are decreasing MoM, CVR is flat, CTR is increasing, and CPA is within 5% of QoQ goals, so we should increase the tROAS by 14%.
Instead, try a more straightforward approach:
- The ad copy containing more educational content about our company is outperforming the one highlighting this month’s sale by driving 40% more conversions.
- Let’s enhance our assets, including site links, callouts, and images, to better qualify users before they reach our site.”
- This insight could also be beneficial for our web team to incorporate some of this language on the landing page and for our social media channels to create short educational videos.
This approach makes the data more accessible and the action items clearer to your audience.
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Automated Reports
Congratulations! You’ve established your KPIs, integrated the relevant metrics into your preferred platform, assessed budget pacing, reviewed your bid strategies, and delivered an exceptional PPC report to your broader team.
In this era of automation, you can streamline the process of receiving essential updates directly to your inbox on a weekly or monthly basis.
In platforms like Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, or SA360, you have the capability to create a report tailored to your specific needs, including date ranges, columns, calculated fields, and additional data layers. Here’s how:
- Navigate to Reports > Custom Reports> Schedule Report.
- Configure the report with the desired frequency and provide the email details to ensure it reaches your inbox when needed.
I strongly recommend using your advertising platform as the initial step and then conducting a more comprehensive analysis either within your data source (e.g., Looker, Datorama) or your omnichannel platform (e.g., SA 360, Skai) to uncover cross-channel insights after delving into your paid search findings.
This approach ensures you gain a holistic perspective on your performance data.
Significant Discoveries to Shape Your PPC Campaigns
Monitoring and assessing PPC performance is a significant challenge. The abundance of data, seasonal patterns, and various factors that influence campaign behaviour make it a complex task.
As professionals in the field of paid search, it’s our responsibility to transform these numbers into narratives, actionable strategies, and testing recommendations to expand an account and share valuable insights with a broader team. While there’s a lot to unravel, this process constitutes the fundamental core of our role.
Would you like to read more about how to Track and Analyze PPC results related articles? If so, we invite you to take a look at our other tech topics before you leave!
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