How to measure the performance of your Google Ads campaigns?
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Paid search can be a very powerful tool to get immediate results and new customers. Provided you know how to handle Google Adwords ads! To do this, defining your objectives and monitoring your campaigns are an essential basis for measuring the performance of your SEA strategy and obtaining good results. After creating your Google Ads account, there is one last step before launching your first campaign: setting your KPI. The KPI or key performance indicator represents a numerical data to be analysed in order to reach your main objective. There are many types of KPIs for all existing web marketing channels. Let’s take a look at the KPIs available on the Google Ads dashboard.
What KPIs should you track on Google Ads to analyse your SEA performance?
Measuring traffic
One of the main objectives when creating campaigns is to increase the number of visits to your website. Indeed, more visits means more awareness, more people reached and therefore, more chances to make new sales. It is therefore possible to track the number of visits to each of your campaigns to determine which one works best. In Google Analytics, you can also get more information by obtaining the percentage of visitors coming from the ATS as well as from other channels. This will show you if the ATS is one of your main levers for getting visits to your website. Also remember to monitor your bounce rate. This data measures the percentage of visitors who immediately leave your landing page after clicking on one of your advertisements. If your bounce rate is high, it means that your campaign has a problem to overcome. This could be due to poor targeting, poor settings or the ad copy needs to be revised for example. This is the time to call in a Google Ads expert to solve this problem as quickly as possible!
Measuring engagement
Are your advertising campaigns working properly? Are they creating enough engagement? The first things to check are the click-through rate (CTR) and the overall number of clicks, which is the number of visitors to your site. These elements are essential to determine the performance of your campaigns. With the click-through rate, you will be able to define the percentage of people who clicked on your ad after having seen it, the number of views corresponding to the data called “impressions“. This could mean that, for example, although you have a high number of clicks on your ad, if the click-through rate is low, you could surely get a lot more engagement by reworking your campaign! Similarly, if you have set up awareness campaigns, don’t panic if the click-through rate is low, the main objective of display campaigns is to increase the total number of impressions, not to encourage clicks! These two examples show the importance of setting clear objectives in order to monitor the right KPIs afterwards. As this step is crucial to obtain effective ads, it is strongly advised to be accompanied by an agency specialising in SEA.
Measuring conversions
Whether you have an e-commerce site or a showcase site, tracking conversions and leads is essential if you have created an advertising campaign with the objective of increasing your contacts or sales. To do this, you need to observe the number of conversions and the conversion rate, also called the transformation rate. That is to say, the percentage of Internet users who have clicked on your ad and subsequently purchased, thus turning the prospect into a customer! The conversion or lead can correspond to several types: buying a product, filling in a contact form, requesting a quote, registering for an event, etc. It is up to you to define the type of conversion associated with your campaign from the start. To obtain a significant number of conversions, it is essential to set up your campaign correctly from the start, because each stage must work perfectly: your ad must gain immediate visibility, obtain clicks to your landing page so that the user can convert. At each stage of the conversion tunnel, you lose users. So you need to optimise your campaign to get a high number of views from the start, which will result in a satisfactory conversion rate. The expertise of a Google Partner certified web agency will be a real asset to get the best results from the start of your campaign.
Measuring the investment
No, conversions are not a direct reflection of turnover! To get an accurate view of your profit, you will need to analyse your ROAS: the return on investment through advertising. This is simply calculated by the profits generated by your advertisements, subtracted from your investment in paid search. If the difference is too small or even negative, there are surely things to be reviewed in the bidding system selected! In order for your campaigns to be profitable, your budget must first of all be relevant to competing advertisers, but above all it must be spent in the right way. There are many different bidding systems available. It’s important to find the one that fits your goal, your Google campaign and your budget to get maximum results for the least amount of money. Think about calling on a Google Ads professional to help you with this crucial step in paid search!
How to use KPIs with Google Ads?
Choose the right KPIs and set objectives
As you will have understood, setting objectives is the first major step when you want to launch yourself into online paid advertising. It is by defining these objectives that you will know which KPIs to analyse and then determine whether your campaign is performing well or not. There are several elements to take into account when defining relevant objectives: the digital marketing strategy, the field of activity, the competition, the budget, but also the prospects you wish to target. Get off to a good start now! Get advice from a digital agency to set up a strategy and viable objectives that will serve you when creating your SEA campaigns but also for all your marketing actions.
Analyse the evolution of KPIs
Google’s advertising network is very practical because of its centralised system. On a single tool, it is possible to obtain numerous data in a few clicks while continuing to manage campaigns. Take advantage of this to monitor the indicators of your campaigns on a regular basis. Indeed, an advertisement that works one day can obtain very different results the next! A new competitor, a change in the Google algorithm or a change in the needs of your targets; many elements can disrupt the performance of your campaigns! Correctly managing an advertising campaign therefore requires measuring its effectiveness on a regular basis. How can you save time during this analysis stage? The trap would be to want to analyse everything and get lost in all the figures. Having determined the indicators to be monitored in advance, you will only have to observe the evolution of these KPIs, since these are the ones that will be really relevant for knowing the performance of your campaign, and not all the numerous data proposed by Google Ads.
Adapting your campaigns according to the results
Measuring the performance of your campaigns mainly allows you to increase the relevance of each of them in order to reach all your objectives. Analysing the performance of the ads by observing the KPIs also facilitates decision-making in all your strategic choices. How does it work? Based on the analysis of the campaigns and their results, you can conclude several aspects such as that your ad is not earning enough, that it is not getting enough visibility or that it is not converting. It is then time to find out what optimisations are possible to create a better performing campaign. This may mean simply deleting a keyword or rewriting your text ads, as well as changing your bidding system, changing the audiences you define, changing the type of campaign or even revising your entire digital strategy. All of this depends of course on each campaign! The best option for a successful campaign from the outset, while spending your budget in the best way, is to call on an agency specialising in SEA paid search. Thanks to its skills, it will be able to set up and manage your campaigns, but also analyse and optimise them if necessary to bring you the best possible results.
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