Pay Per Click 101 – Part 4 – How To Know Which PPC Advertisement Is the Best

This is the fourth article in our five-part series on the basics of Pay Per Click Marketing. We’re unpackaging a three-step process,

• Trial
• Understand
• Change

This series will reveal how to get the best results from your Pay Per Click marketing campaign. Our last article discussed the need to trial various advertisements rather than sinking all your money into just one. Here we show how to understand what the results of those individual advertisements are telling you. Your goal is to choose the best two or three and increase the amount of money you spend on each one to drive customers to your website.

PS: If you’re not sure what some of the terms in this article mean, check out our first part of this series ‘PPC Jargon explained’.

If you’ve done as suggested in this series so far, you will have created a number of advertisements grouped around specific keywords relevant to your target audience. Each of these advertisements will go to a specific landing page, highly relevant to the content of the ad. Below are the most important metrics you want to consider when deciding which of these advertisements is the best to scale up your pay per click advertising campaign.

Click Through Rate (CTR)

King amongst metrics is the click through rate. How many people are actually finding the advertisement relevant enough to click on it and be directed to your site? Just to advertise on Google is not enough; you want people to actually come to your website as a result.

Impressions vs Impression Share (IS)

Impressions are the number of times your advertisement was displayed in the Search Engine Results Page. Impression Share (IS) is the number of times your advertisement could have been shown. Your goal is to ensure your advertisement showed up every possible time there was a customer searching for your product. You want your ‘Impression Share’ to be 100%. That means that your ad was displayed at every possible opportunity.

You can increase your Impression Share by:

• Increasing your bid per click.
  If you’re willing to pay more per click, Google will be more likely to show your advertisement)
• Increasing your daily budget.
  If your daily budget is likely to run out, Google will ‘throttle’ the amount of times your ad is shown in order to space it out evenly over the day. Check out the % figure next to ‘Lost IS (budget)’.
• Increasing the Quality Score of your advertisement.
  This is a combination of factors including how many people click on your advertisement, relevance of ad to the keywords and the history of all the ads in your account. As long as you are doing the right thing and using the ads to target people who will be genuinely interested in your product, you should receive a high quality score.

Bounces

It’s good to get excited by the number of people clicking through to your website but if those people are immediately leaving your page, you’ll be spending money on clicks without seeing any return in sales. This is why the ‘bounce’ metric is so important. You won’t find this on your Adwords panel, you need to head to the analytics of your website. If you tied each advertisement to a specific landing page, you can tell which landing pages have customers leaving as soon as they arrive.

Conversions

More important than bounces are actual conversions. At the risk of repeating ourselves, there’s no point driving traffic to your website if they’re not actually going to buy from you once there. Decide what action you want them to complete and measure the effectiveness of the ad based on whether this action is actually completed by those people visiting your website. You can set these up to be displayed automatically by setting ‘goals’ in your Analytics.

There are plenty of other metrics available to look at on the Google Adwords management interface but the above measures are the most important. When starting out you want to get good at the basics. Next up, we’ll talk about how to use these basics to grow your PPC advertising results.

If you’re struggling to understand your pay per click marketing campaigns, you probably need a reputed pay per click company like Complete Cloud to jump in and help you.

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