5 Key Metrics to measure for AdWords Success and a FREE AdWords Report Template
Starting a Google AdWords campaign can be daunting at first, but with practice and perseverance you can easily find day-to-day wins and performance increases. One of the most common problems is the lack of measurement and understanding of the key metrics to measure and gauge health and performance of a campaign. Once these are understood and regularly measured, changes to season, industry competitiveness or areas a campaign can improve on are easy to identify.
The 5 key Metrics to measure are
- Conversions
- Conversion Rate
- Cost Per Conversion
- Click Through Rate
- CPC
Conversions
A huge problem with most campaigns is not having some form of conversion tracking. If you are running an e-commerce store you should be feeding back your sales data into Google AdWords. If your site is for lead-gen, subscriptions, etc. then you would want to be tracking forms or phone calls. Being able to look at your conversion volume over time and get an accurate picture of fluctuations can help in discovering areas to improve in. Not to mention your business’s key metrics, stock levels, pricing, ROI, profit.
Conversion Rate
Simply put, the % rate which you convert your visitors into sales or leads, this is important to assess both how well your landing page is converting visitors and how relevant the traffic you are sending is. Also demand can play a part in your conversion rates, for example during Christmas, an ecommerce store may have less visitors doing just research and more looking to make a purchase immediately.
Cost Per Conversion (CPA)
Any fluctuation in this can mean a number of things, is your campaign delivering effectively? Are your average CPC’s going up or down, has there been a significant change to conversion rate? Is there a new competitor on the market? Or are there seasonal reasons why this would change. This is also your metric to watch when deciding on profitability of product ranges or individual campaigns, AdGroups, keywords, placements and networks. This is a key metric to help you weight budgets, obviously more budget on the lower cost per conversions.
Click Through Rate (CTR)
Watching this within your campaign can help you identify tired ad copy or banners, refreshing and testing new ads in areas that are seeing a drop in CTR will improve your campaigns. This is also a factor in increasing quality scores, which lead to cheaper CPC’s for your current ad positions.
Cost Per Click (CPC)
This metric is where most people start with when optimising, however, all of the above metrics need to be considered prior to adjusting your CPC’s. Regularly measuring your average CPC can help you determine which areas to focus on in your optimisations. It is also a key indicator of increased competition. CPC is the best metric you’ve got to track the effectiveness of your account’s quality score, so regular monitoring of this metric is essential.
FREE Excel AdWords Report Template
Instructions
- Go to sheet labelled ‘data entry sheet’
- Enter your clients details and date (date in format dd.mm.yyyy)
- Export your account performance report from the AdWords interface
- Go to sheet labelled ‘data’
- Copy and paste the exported data into column B row 1, copy the exported data completely including headers.
- Drag down the formula found in column A so that it appears for all rows within your report data.
- Right click one of the tables found on the ‘Report’ tab and click ‘Refresh’.
- You’re done, go to sheet labelled ‘Report’ and view.
Hope you’ve found this article useful, please leave your questions and comments below!
