Posted by
Michael Lerner
The important factor in spending advertising dollars is return on investment. When it comes to Google AdWords spending, you have to keep track of which Campaigns and Keywords are truly converting. Regardless of conversions, Google will automatically take your money in PPC auctions based on the spending limits you set. Google’s primary concern in their AdWords product is revenue. In fact it accounts for $60 billion that Google pulls in every year through placing Campaign and Keyword ads throughout the internet and Search Engines from various AdWord vehicles. That’s a lot of $1 or $2 clicks, or even up to $50 clicks for a competitive keywords and high quality score industry.
With the Rank Ranger suite of PPC reports you can research your KPI’s to find the campaigns that are maximizing the return on your AdWords dollars. The new AdWords Daily Performance Report breaks down all of your AdWords campaigns combined or specific campaigns you select, with day by day traffic and brand KPI’s Clicks, Impressions, CTR, Average CPC, and Total Cost. With this data you can determine which campaigns are trending up and which AdWord campaigns under-perform and need to be updated or suspended. Analysis can heighten your awareness of several important factors including, your potential customer’s buying conditions, market forces like competitor’s bidding for the same keywords and which landing pages are performing well.
First, determine which Campaigns to focus on based on broad performance factors as seen in the AdWords Campaigns Report. Look at each AdWords Campaign’s Traffic Metrics and sort by the factors most important to your conversion. Sort by:
- sessions
- percentage of new sessions
- new users
- bounce rate
- pages per session
- average session duration
- goal conversion rate
- goal completions
- goal value per campaign
Conversions are at the heart of success of any online marketing. In Traffic Metrics you can find which Campaign is performing best and worst by the most critical factor. Having Custom Goal conversions set up in Google Analytics you can track them in Rank Ranger and find the best and least performing campaigns.
Google AdWords Campaigns, Traffic Metrics
You can find out which campaigns are actually resulting in a conversion to develop a Cost Per Conversion KPI and Conversion Rate KPI. Strong conversions mean successful AdWords campaigns and successful Landing Pages.
Once you have focused on a few AdWords Campaigns determining which Campaign is working and which is not performing, you should look at the costs of those Campaigns in AdWords Metrics to see Campaign cost. Here metrics include:
- Clicks
- impressions
- CTR (click through rate)
- Average CPC (cost per click)
- Cost per campaign
In this report, you should see that you are putting the most money into your highest converting campaigns. In the same way, you might find some value in campaigns that are performing well, but costs are down. Those campaigns that are costing but not converting are money losers and thus your ROI will be much lower.
Google AdWords Campaigns, AdWords Metrics
Click Through Ratio is another metric to follow closely. CTR has a huge effect on AdWords campaigns. A high CTR leads to a higher quality score, which reduces your CPC and increases your volume of ads.
Now, you have a list of sorted AdWords campaigns that you want to track even more deeply. To deep dive on your power campaigns and weaker return campaigns open the Google AdWords Daily Performance Report. Filter in Analytics Settings by the campaign that you are researching, and the dates of the campaign to see if the trend for that campaign has been rising or falling over the period.
Of course, the point of AdWords and PPC is not spending money, it’s the end conversion or transaction that matters. If a campaign is tailing in performance, time to refresh the keyword, landing page or spending parameters. Consumer Initiated Marketing is finding those keywords that your buyers are focusing on at the right time in their decision making process for you to help them the most.
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