PPC – It’s All A Number’s Game
Well, to be honest, it’s not *all* a number’s game. Direct response copywriting, knowing what a target market’s hot buttons are…these are all very important skills for the PPC specialist too. But once you’ve done your market research and crafted some well-written ads, you need to spend a lot of time looking at the numbers.
What numbers, you ask?
There are many statistics to be mindful of, but when you’ve first launched a campaign, it’s very important to make sure you don’t have any “stray” keywords that are draining your budget. A keyword may be stray for any number of reasons – it could be that this keyword is attracting much more traffic than you thought it would. In this case, a stray keyword can be a good thing assuming it is bringing in targeted traffic that converts. So the action here would be to increase your (daily) budget. On the flip side though, a stray keyword could be one that is only marginally related to your offer, but is receiving the lion’s share of the clicks (for any number of reasons). In this case it may be best to pause the keyword so as not to deplete your budget.
In addition to stray keywords, you also need to monitor your click through rate (CTR). AdWords makes this very simple to do within their native interface. Similarly, you should be split-testing two ads per adgroup against each other to see which one brings the most profit. In many cases, the ad with the higher CTR will also bring in the most profit, however that’s not always the case! That is why it’s critical to not merely track CTR, but also conversions per ad.
Other important metrics to keep track of? Your conversion rate, for sure. Do you know what your conversion rate should be in your market for a similar offer? Hopefully you have an idea, but if not it’s time you find out with your own data. Again, the native AdWords interface makes this quite simple assuming you’re firing Google’s pixel upon a successful conversion (be that an opt-in, sale, etc.). After you gather some data in your campaign, you’ll want to pay close to your cost per conversion. Simply put, this is the amount of adspend to acquire a single conversion. You want to be doing everything you can to continually bring this number down.
This is a very high-level post on the subject. To many of you this will seem quite basic and introductory, yet I know for many of you this might seem a little technical (unfortunately many advertisers don’t pay attention to metrics). Rest assured we’ll be doing a follow-up post soon that goes into more detail on specific metrics you should be tracking.
