It isn’t exactly a well-guarded secret that your typical PPC advertiser has a lot of data at their disposal. There are a lot of KPIs which have more significance than others, and we’ll be identifying six of them.

The power of PPC advertising is obvious – we can use it to make real-time changes based on the data that comes in. Now, with that being said, it is also the case that we can focus on the wrong metrics and mess up badly, or fail to focus on the right metrics at all.

Despite this, there are a lot of great metrics to track, and they all have a specific purpose, but ultimately your campaign should focus on certain KPIs among all others. Let’s take a look at what these are together.

The importance of goal definition.

When starting to measure key performance indicators, you need to make sure that you track ones which help to focus your business toward goals. Every PPC management campaign that you create needs to be built with a specific purpose of seeing what success will be for you.

It’s ultimately very important to think about the bigger picture and try to remember what the purpose of the campaign is today. If you had to explain to your boss what the value of your campaign was, how would you sell it? What would you say to convince them of the value of the campaign, offset against the finances and effort required?

The KPIs that we are going to talk about today will help to support the common goals for marketing – you might have different ones and that is perfectly normal.

The basic premise is that when you track metrics, the most important one you need to focus on is the one which lines up with the end goal of your campaign. That is the importance of defining your goals before you start.

1. Sales lift measurements.

Most standard PPC campaigns all have a tendency to ladder up with the intention of increasing sales. Regardless of whether the sales come through in-store purchases, products bought through e-commerce, or simply lead generation, the premise remains the same.

Proper PPC management revolves around tracking the KPI that helps to tell you if the campaign is improving sales at all – that’s the goal of your campaign for many.  This is one of the most important metrics to track, albeit one of the hardest because some sales occur away from the digital realm. With that being said, it is important to remember there are different ways to measure sales lift.

E-commerce sales lift.

The easiest area to measure the impact a PPC campaign can have on sales is through e-commerce; PPC management becomes a lot easier when you have the ability to see purchase data as it happens in real time.

For a lot of companies, being able to track sales, as well as purchase data, is so important as a KPI.

In-store sales lift.

When it comes to measuring the purchases made in-store, you’ll find that things become a little more challenging, but ultimately, still workable. You have to make a few more inferences that you might with e-commerce but it is doable.

One of the best ways that you can do this is to use first-party data. If you connect it to transactions that take place in-store, you’ll see that you can track it back to advertising campaigns for any situation.

Alternatively, a good idea is to offer people a way to order ahead of time, or coupons to use when they visit your store. Both help a lot with PPC management because they give you the ability to measure the visits based on foot traffic. It’s good when there isn’t a lot of transaction data to match up.

Alternatively, a more offbeat way to measure the value of your campaign is to track who uses the location extension software to get directions.

Lead generation sales lift.

When it comes to measuring the sales lift for your lead generation campaigns, you should make sure that you track the whole journey of the customer. See, most campaigns will use the KPIs of lead volume and the total cost per lead. However, that’s just two of the metrics to measure.

Ultimately, you need to track the whole sales pipeline, as well as marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads. By measuring the conversion rates of the leads through the whole funnel, you’ll be able to figure out which campaigns, channels and targeting choices are the most valuable – the most likely to get you a sale.

Using marketing mix modelling to measure sales lift.

When you haven’t been blessed with a clear, visible line from your clicks to your sales, then there is no way for you to track all of those interactions. If this is you, your PPC management might benefit from marketing mix modelling.

Using this method, advertising teams can look at trends by examining the performance baseline, and then comparing that with the baseline after you’ve gotten started with marketing efforts.

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2. The revenue.

When it comes to increasing sales, it’s almost primarily for that big picture goal of driving up revenue. When it comes to e-commerce, it’s not difficult to do. You just track it alongside your sales once you’ve implemented purchase tracking. If you’re an advertiser who also collects data about offline sales processes, you’re in business.

With that being said, advertisers have a few gaps in their online presence and then their offline sales processes, and this means that they then have to extrapolate using their estimated values and average orders.

This is no bad thing, it’s good from a PPC management standpoint to have a rough idea of how your campaigns are doing, because the bottom line for most campaigns is revenue.

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3. ROAS.

To take things to an even further height, it’s a good idea to focus on your revenue in regards to a ratio to ad spend, or ROAS for short. We calculate ROAS by dividing the revenue that we make by the amount we spend on ads. This specific metric is good for working out how well an ad spend is helping in regards to driving up value.

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4. ROI.

ROAS is a good metric to keep in mind, but it doesn’t account for costs outside of ad spending. That means that you need to keep one eye on profit and return on investment (ROI), during your PPC management.

Basically, this helps to make sure that your campaigns are going to drive value even after you’ve taken all the other costs into consideration.

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5. Audience performance/higher funnel engagements.

There are going to be some campaigns which focus a lot less on sales and tend to focus a little bit more on higher funnel engagement and awareness. The common focus is that measuring sales data is good is important, but it’s not always the main objective. The argument is that there are a lot of other engagement metrics which are worth monitoring, which is good.

Data for brand lifts.

Some social advertising options let the advertiser run studies for brand lift. You get the chance to monitor the impact on brand lift in a safe and sensible way. It’s easy to see a campaign’s impact on the brand compared to people who don’t see your ads – a control group of sorts. In fact, Facebook even offers you a brand recall metric – they estimate so you can use the figure in studies. These types of studies can be a bit pricey, so it is important to know there’s other types of brand awareness monitoring for your PPC management.

Branded search monitoring.

When it comes to branded search monitoring, you can use it to check the impacts of your campaigns in terms of brand awareness. So, if your campaign is successful, then your branded search volume should be increasing.

Assisted and view-through conversions.

Those campaigns which are Top of Funnel offerings aren’t necessarily big for conversion drivers. They’re still a good metric to track, however.

Even if they don’t do as well as you’d like, from a PPC management standpoint, it can be important to keep a lookout for their long-term impact. You can do this through view-through conversions, and assisted conversions. This hinges on the premise that the journey of the buyer isn’t too long that cookies can’t track.

Micro-conversions.

A good way to find yourself some pretty concrete data is to try and drive any high-funnel traffic to a micro-conversion. You can define the specific micro-conversion based on what your end goal is – for example, some people like to measure the way that visitors to the site engage with the resources available.

So, how many people visited the landing page? How many people downloaded a product sheet? Who subscribed to the newsletter?

All of these actions are to help show if people are interested enough to give the company to find out if people are interested in learning more. Besides, you can build specific content for your audience.

Engaging with the audience.

When you have managed to build an audience off funnel engagement, you’ll then need to keep an eye on the audience by using Google Analytics.

You can monitor how often people return to the site to complete micro-conversions, and also check whether people exhibit the behaviour of someone likely to make a purchase.

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6. Campaign health.

The last KPI that you should be tracking as part of PPC management is the campaign health.

This is not usually classed as a KPI as such, simply because they aren’t typically metrics that tie into marketing goals as closely as you’d like.

With that being said, however, they’re important to support metrics which help to ladder up the goals of the business, so they’re important in that sense.

It’s important to realise that these metrics can be a good indicator of whether or not the campaign has more space to grow and improve, but these aren’t metrics which are worth reporting to your boss as such, they’re just for you as part of PPC management.

There’s a lot of different metrics to consider, but they all have similar ideas, and these are the most important ones:

Cost-efficient metrics.

The overall cost-effectiveness of an interaction is always a good metric to observe. This is not technically a KPI, but it is important to keep in mind. Because you would not optimise toward it, it does not classify in the conventional sense. With that being said, it is worth keeping an eye on this particular metric, because it will dictate a lot of what you choose to do.

Click-through rates.

The click through rate that you encounter will be a vital metric for gauging how relevant advertisements are towards the people who you wish to see them. If your advertisement has a low click through rate, that might mean that the advertisement could be improved, or that you are simply not targeting the correct audience to best deploy the campaign towards.

It is important to measure trending performances, because this makes sure that you can perform adjustments and improvements in real time, so when things begin to occur, you are capable of dealing with them in a much more productive and efficient manner than before.

Conversion rates.

Your conversion rate will provide you with key information as to whether or not a landing page is relevant, as well as how optimised it is for converting leads into sales.

If you are dealing with an overall low conversion rate, this could be the result of something on the site not performing to standard, or it could be that the audience you are attempting to target is not the correct one for your business. Furthermore, it could indicate that they are not in the correct stage of the funnel to take the next step towards the sale. It’s important to keep an eye on this.

In a similar vein, click through rate monitoring trends to do with conversion rates allows you to identify and deal with any problems you encounter in real time.

Impression shares.

An impression share is a helpful metric to have, as it allows you to gauge how much more you could scale your existing campaign. So, you would learn whether you had the potential to increase the campaign or decrease, as well as your opportunities for aggressive bidding or simply the knowledge as to whether or not you have to improve your budget.

On-site engagements.

On-site engagements are effective early indicators for identifying whether or not the audience is interested in the product or service you are attempting to sell.

Your best decision in this regard would be to keep an eye on characteristics like the average session that a visitor spends on the site, the bounce rate, and the number of pages they visit on average, because this will allow you to keep track of which pieces of content are resonating with what.

Quality scores.

One of the best metrics that you can track which will provide you with a fundamental understanding of the effectiveness of your campaign is the quality score. It is a health metric, instead of a KPI, but it’s still worth keeping an eye on.

The quality score can be used to identify where campaigns could be improved, but at the same time, do not let your quality score distract you from your main objective.

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Final thoughts.

As you can probably tell, there are quite a few different analytics and metrics that you should be keeping an eye on when it comes to successfully monitoring a PPC campaign. PPC management is all about being able to identify and react to shifts and changes in the effectiveness and overall success of the campaign, and being able to do so will result in a vastly superior experience. Developing precise control over what’s going on is the best thing that you can do.