How Do You Know When Your PPC Campaign Is Working?

An effective PPC campaign yields 50% more conversions than organic traffic, according to data compiled by Moz. But how do you know your PPC campaign is working effectively?

As a marketing strategy, PPC offers a fantastic return on investment and can even deliver immediate results. If you want to place your brand in front of your target market as quickly as possible, and don’t have time to build a long-term SEO strategy, then PPC is ideal. It’s also useful when you want to promote a new deal to a specific niche.

The only real downside to pay-per-click is that this type of marketing isn’t free. So to make sure you’re investing smartly, you want to be sure your PPC campaign will yield results.

Understanding how PPC works

Google is the most popular pay-per-click advertising model in the world, so it’s important to realise that your brand will be up against a lot of competition.

Your PPC ads will be put into a pool with other competitor ads. When a search term is entered, Google Ads will analyse the pool to see which ads to position in the most valuable spots on the page. 64.6% of people click on Google Ads when they wish to buy something online, so your ad must stand out from the crowd.

The Google Ads algorithms look at two main elements – your CPC bid and the Quality Score. The cost-per-click or CPC bid will have been decided during the PPC campaign setup.

You must choose how much you are willing to spend each time someone clicks on one of your ads. This will be measured alongside your Quality Score. This second metric takes into account the quality of your landing pages, along with the relevancy to the keywords you’re bidding on, and finally your click-through rate, or CTR.

What is the average position of your ads?

There are limited ad spots on a Google page, but you’ll want yours to be displayed within the top three spots to get noticed. Ads lower down the page can get quite lost within the noise of other brands vying for attention.

If you notice that your ads aren’t converting as well as you’d like, then it’s worth checking out where they’re featuring. You may need to increase your bids to elevate them into a better position.

Understanding your click-through-rate

If your PPC ads are being displayed but aren’t being clicked on, this is a sign that your PPC campaign isn’t working effectively. Low CTR can be related to your average ad position, but it may also be because you’re not choosing the best keywords or there may be issues within your ad creative.

Think about your ad from the point-of-view of the user who has typed in their search term. If your ad copy and also your call-to-action doesn’t match their expectations, then they’ll be unlikely to click on your ad. Although you pay for clicks rather than displays, Google Ads will reward advertisers with excellent CTR and quality scores by lowering the amount they need to bid on key search terms.

Optimising your conversion rate

Before you begin your PPC campaign, you should work out what your goals are. Are you hoping to achieve greater brand recognition, or is your main goal to improve sales figures?

Softer conversion goals might be to encourage social shares, or to persuade visitors to sign up for a newsletter email, whereas harder conversion goals will result in direct sales. Whatever your objective, you’ll want the clicks from your PPC campaign through to your website to have a meaningful action, or else you’ll be wasting your ad spend.

How long are users staying on your site?

Google Analytics goes hand in hand with Google Ads. To get a complete overview of what’s happening when someone clicks on your web pages, you’ll need to dig deep into your traffic stats.

To monitor how well your PPC campaign is working, you should check your average bounce rate – in other words, how long a visitor remains on your site before clicking out and looking elsewhere. If they click through to one of your landing pages, what do they do next? Do they explore other pages on your site before they leave or do they begin to browse through your product selection? Their exit point can be really useful in determining where you might can make site improvements which will help your PPC campaign to work better.

Take some benchmark stats, such as average session time and number of pages viewed and see if you can tweak your PPC campaign to entice visitors to stay with you a little longer. The key here is to ensure that your landing pages match the promise of your ad. Your site users will want a great user experience, so it’s important that your site design:

• Is visually-pleasing
• Is easy to navigate
• Has clear and well-positioned call-to-action buttons.

Run a successful PPC marketing campaign

PPC is a complex marketing method, but the further you analyse and test the performance of your ads, the more you can get out of them.

For most companies, PPC can be quite time-consuming and may even take away from the daily running of the business, so outsourcing tends to be the preferred option.

Online Scientists are experts in handling PPC campaigns, large or small and from a wide variety of industries. Our digital marketing professionals will run a carefully controlled PPC campaign for you, which will be fully optimised.

We’ll maintain your ads frequently, follow best practices and make the necessary tweaks to ensure your ads are continuously improving. Alongside Google Ads campaigns, we also manage Bing, Facebook ads and other PPC accounts.

If you want a greater return on your investment and to increase awareness of your brand, then get in touch to find out more about our professional PPC management packages. Contact Online Scientists today.