PPC Metrics You Should Monitor in Google AdWords

Maybe reading about the benefits of Google AdWords in the last chapter convinced you to start running ads. Or just maybe, you have already been running ads for a while now. If your answer is yes to either, good job so far! Now, the next most important thing is to understand that just running ads won’t cut it – your objective should be clear – to either get high-quality leads or to sell more products online.

To achieve these business objectives, your ad campaigns should perform well at all levels. This is where different PPC metrics come into the picture. Only by identifying key PPC metrics, monitoring them regularly, and tweaking ads accordingly would allow you to get anywhere close to your objectives with AdWords.

Quality Score

Probably the most important AdWords metric to be monitored on a daily basis.

Measured on a scale from 1 to 10, this score lets you know how relevant your keywords, ad copy, and landing pages are to the search query.

You can find the quality score metric in keyword-level reporting,

The quality score is measured for each keyword in your campaign. In addition to the factors mentioned above, it is also impacted by the historical performance of the keyword and the landing page experience. This is why, you’d notice that when you add a new keyword, the quality score appears as “-“. This is because it doesn’t have any past performance data to predict the score.

Why is quality score such a big deal?

High-quality score (means high ad relevance) –> higher ad position –> more clicks –> Higher CTR –> Lower CPC + High-quality clicks

Eventually, it’s obvious that a lower CPC = lower cost of conversion and high-quality clicks = higher quality leads.

Click Through Rate (CTR)

CTR is the percentage of clicks your ad received compared to the number of times it appeared in search.

PPC metrics

For example, if your ad/keyword received 10 clicks, and it received 2000 impressions, the CTR is 0.5%.

Average Position
This is the position of your ad on Google paid search. If your average position value is more than 5, most probably your ad isn’t appearing on the first page. By monitoring this, you’d know exactly when your rankings are starting to drop.

This is an important metric because when the average position of your ad is maintained between 1-3, you have more opportunities to:

Appear on the top of the first page,
Get more visibility
Increase CTR on your ads
Eventually, convert more leads
Avg position metric you can see under, campaign, ad group, ad, and keyword-level reporting.

Conversion Rate

Conversion is the most important part of your campaign – it is your campaign objective. So, this tells you the percentage of people who are actually filling up your forms/buying your products, etc. against the number of clicks your ad received.

Device

This is a metric that hardly finds a mention in most articles discussing PPC metrics, but in my experience, it’s very important to measure ad performance by device. Desktop ads would perform differently than mobile ads, so you need different optimizations for them, and that’s what this report would help you with.

First page, top page, and first position bid
Let’s define them first:

• First-page bid – This estimates the CPC for an ad that appears on the first page of the search results.
• Top Page bid – This estimates the CPC for an ad that appears on the top half of the first page in Google search results.
• First position bid – This estimates the CPC for an ad that appears on the topmost position in Google search results.