We all know paid advertising is a bit of a gamble. As strong as your strategy is, predicting your results and, consequently, your client’s ROI is impossible. And whether or not they’re getting their money’s worth will be your client’s first question.
When it comes down to it, can you confidently tell your client if your ad campaign is successful? Can you give them more details than just a blanket “Yes” or “No”?
Today, we will discuss the metrics you need to assess, along with benchmarks you can use to compare performance and strategies to move forward.
Your Key Metrics
Platforms like Google Ads can spit a lot of metrics and jargon at you as you scramble to assess your campaigns. Stay with me – these are the ones you should be focusing on to get the best idea of your performance:
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
CTR goes beyond the number of people clicking. It calculates the percentage of people clicking on your ad out of everyone who has seen it. This is a critical indicator to see how many people are interested and engaged by your ads and can help you update it as needed. For example, it’s time to reassess your content if you see a consistently low CTR. If you started strong but your CTR starts to fall off, your audience may be experiencing ad fatigue and need something new.
Conversions and Conversion Rate
Conversions will obviously be a significant metric for your client. It’s a tangible number that tells them how many people showed genuine interest by giving contact information, making a phone call, downloading content, etc. Your conversion rate will tell you how many people are converting to potential clients compared to the total audience who have seen your ad. Conversions and conversion rates should be a more tailored goal, depending on the specifics of the product your client is offering. Some may see 10 to 12 monthly conversions for content downloads; for others, three to four contact submissions may be a significant win.
Cost-Per-Click (CPC)
Your CPC metric is crucial. It’s the one that tells you how much you are paying every time someone clicks on your ad. This number can fluctuate depending on keyword competitiveness, your ad quality, and how much you’re bidding. Ideally, you should shoot for a lower CPC to help maximize your client’s overall ROI. If you’re noticing a consistently high CPC, that’s a signal to reevaluate your content and see if you can improve the quality (more relevant keywords, how helpful your landing page is, etc.)
Keyword Performance
How did you decide what keywords to include in your ad campaign? There are plenty of tools on the market to help you identify the strongest contenders. Targeted and successful campaigns require in-depth keyword research to help you understand the current trends and popular searches for your focus. Choosing the right keywords is a delicate balance. Using tools like SemRUSH and Google Keyword Planner, you can calculate how “difficult” it would be to compete with other companies compared to how popular the search is, ideally picking ones that are still relevant to your campaigns where you can still make an impact.
Impressions
This is a bonus metric I would take with a grain of salt. High impressions may be exciting for a client (big numbers are always good, right?). But in reality, we know that just because our ad gets in front of a large audience doesn’t make it successful. I would compare your impressions with your CTR and conversion rate. Is there a significant discrepancy between these metrics? AKA, are you getting crazy impressions but little follow-through? That tells you something isn’t working, and you may have to go back to the drawing board.
Benchmarks
Industry benchmarks give you a ballpark for average performance for similar businesses. If you need help deciphering if your campaign is successful, these are a great place to start. They can also give your clients more concrete context:
“Most businesses have X CPC, and we have X. So we’re above the industry average.” Fantastic, now we’re all on the same page!
Here are some helpful links for industry benchmarks for different outlets. Choose the sector that most closely aligns with your business and compare the average results to yours:
Moving Forward
Great, you have all the metrics you need to decide how your campaign is performing. Now what?
Data is only helpful if you use it to move forward and optimize your strategies. These metrics are the key to creating more specific, targeted, and conversion-boosting campaigns. Are you noticing keywords consistently not getting hits? Remove those bad boys and update your keyword research. Are there certain landing pages that are blowing it out of the water? Find out what’s working best there and see how you can replicate that on other pages.
Combining these metrics into a comprehensive report will help you spot the patterns or holes that could impact your campaign, either boosting efficacy or holding you back. Getting more familiar with these stats will surely help your ad performance grow!
