Trick or Treat? How to Tell What’s Working & What Isn’t for Your PPC Campaign

Running a PPC (pay-per-click) campaign can sometimes be both easy and tricky at times. When you put your budget into advertising, you should wait for the results to come in, in the hope that they’re worth waiting for at the end. 

But how do you know if your PPC campaign is actually delivering results or whether it’s playing tricks on you? The good news is it isn’t left to guesswork. By monitoring the right PPC metrics and understanding what they can actually tell you about your campaigns, you’ll be able to:

• Identify what’s working
• Spot areas for improvement 
• Make better use of your advertising budget 

So, here’s how you can tell what’s working and what isn’t for your PPC campaign, both at Halloween and for the rest of the year.

Have the right ghouls…we meant goals!

Before you begin, you need to know what it is you’re trying to achieve. Your goal might be to increase online sales, encourage people to request a quote, generate more enquiries or to simply drive more relevant traffic to your website. Whatever your objectives are, they need to be both clearly defined and measurable. 

Otherwise, it becomes somewhat difficult to determine whether the campaign you’re running is successful or not. For instance, if your goal is to generate enquiries for your business, you’ll want to pay close attention to metrics like conversions and cost per conversion. 

Do this instead of focusing wholly on the number of clicks you’re receiving. Your PPC goals should align with your wider business objectives, essentially. This is because there’s little value in generating thousands of website visits if those visitors aren’t interested in your services or products. 

Don’t be a Psycho about the clicks

Clicks are exciting, especially when you can see that there are a lot of them continuously. However, it’s important that you don’t become obsessed with them. A click is only the beginning of the consumer journey. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the person who clicked your advert is going to buy anything, make an enquiry or take any other valuable action as a result of clicking on it. 

Your click-through-rate (CTR) measures the percentage of people who see your advert and subsequently click on it. A high CTR can indicate that your advert is relevant and appealing to your target audience. However, a low CTR suggests your ad copy, targeting, or keyword selection needs to be more refined and therefore requires some action. 

On the other hand, CTR shouldn’t be the only thing that’s measured. An advert could generate thousands of clicks, but very few conversions. In this case, a high CTR doesn’t always mean the campaign is delivering a good return on investment (ROI). The quality of the traffic you generate matters just as much as the quantity of the traffic you’re receiving. So keep this in mind when it comes to click rates.

Conversion rates can be a case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, so check them regularly

Your conversion rate tells you how many people take a desired action after clicking on your advert. Depending on your business, a conversion could be counted every time someone completes a purchase, fills out a contact form, requests a quote, calls your business, books an appointment or signs up for a service.

Conversion rate reveals very different sides of your PPC campaign from what the click data suggests. You might have an advert with an impressive CTR, but the conversion rate could be extremely disappointing. On the other hand, an advert with a lower CTR could be attracting fewer visitors, but the conversion rate may be much higher. 

This is why it’s important for you to monitor conversion rates regularly as opposed to assuming that lots of clicks automatically mean lots of business. If your conversion rate suddenly drops, then it needs to be investigated. Some of the things that could be an issue include the following:

• The advert 
• Keywords
• Overall targeting 
• The landing page
• Website experience
• The offer you’re presenting

You’d Better Watch Out: You can pay too much

PPC advertising can be expensive, especially if you aren’t keeping an eye on your costs. Cost-per-click (CPC) tells you how much you’re spending, on average, for each click on your advert. While keeping CPC under control is paramount, the cheapest clicks aren’t always considered to be the most valuable.

For instance, a £1 click that never results in a conversion could be far less valuable than a £5 click from someone who becomes a customer. If your CPC is increasing considerably, then it may be worth reviewing your keywords, competition, targeting and bidding strategy in general. 

The key here is to look at the cost alongside the results. Instead of trying to achieve the lowest possible CPC, consider whether the traffic you’re paying for is relevant and commercially valuable. If you’re spending too much with very little ROI, then your approach needs to be modified. 

What’s more important? IT usually is the cost per conversion (CPC)

When assessing the effectiveness of your PPC campaign, CPC can be one of the most useful metrics to monitor. It tells you how much it would cost to generate a conversion on average. For instance, if you spend £500 on PPC and it generates 25 conversions, then the average CPC is £20. 

Whether or not £20 is a good ROI depends entirely on your business. If a new customer is with £500 to your business, then spending £20 to generate a conversion should be considered an investment and is therefore a viable option financially. On the other hand, if the customer is worth less than £20 to you, then this approach should be reassessed.

This is why CPC can provide more of a meaningful insight into your PPC campaign than clicks alone. It helps you to connect your advertising spend to a specific action that actually matters to your business. Something else to remember is that CPC can also mean cost-per-click, so be sure of which metric you’re referring to in this case. 

Don’t ghost search terms

Just because you’ve chosen your keywords doesn’t mean to say that you can forget about them. Your PPC adverts will sometimes appear for search enquiries that aren’t especially relevant to your individual business. If you’re paying for clicks from people who aren’t interested in what it is you’re offering, then your budget will disappear in no time.

This is why regular reviews of your search terms are an important task. For instance, a business that offers professional window repairs may not want to appear for searches such as “DIY window repairs”, but they will want to appear for searches related to “window repair services”. 

Search term data can also reveal a few new opportunities. You may find that potential customers are searching for products or services that use phrases you hadn’t originally considered. With this in mind, don’t let your search terms become ghosts. Keep checking them to see what people are really searching for to be as beneficial to you as possible.

Monitor landing pages to avoid Misery

Getting someone to see your advert is half of the battle. Once they’ve landed on your website, you need to give them a reason to stay on your site and take the next steps. An advert, campaign or website that’s poorly designed, slow or confusing can undo all of the hard work that you’ve put into your PPC campaign. 

Make sure that your landing page matches the advert that brought the visitor there. If your advert promises a particular service, product, or offer, the landing page should make it immediately clear how the visitor can access what they need. You should also monitor metrics like engagement and conversion rates to see which pages are underperforming.

If a particular advert is generating plenty of clicks, but the corresponding landing page isn’t producing conversions, then there could be a further problem down the customer journey. To determine what works best for your audience, test headlines, calls to action (CTAs), offers and landing pages. 

Measure return on ad spend (ROAS), but you’d Better Watch Out – it has limitations

Return on ad spend (ROAS) can provide useful overviews of how much revenue your advertising generates when compared with the amount you actually spend on it. For instance, if you spend £1,000 on PPC and generate £4,000 in directly attributed revenue, your ROAS is 4:1. 

This can be a useful metric to ascertain when it comes to assessing the financial performance of your campaigns. However, it’s important to note that ROAS isn’t the whole story. It doesn’t necessarily account for other business costs, like staff wages, product costs, fulfilment, overheads and other expenses associated with acquiring and serving customers.

A PPC campaign could have a strong ROAS while still producing less profit than expected. This is why ROAs should be considered alongside other metrics and your wider business finances as opposed to being used as the sole measure of PPC campaign success. While it’s still useful, it does have some limitations. 

Prevent The Vanishing of your budget

One of the biggest benefits of monitoring your PPC data is that you can spot wasted spend before it gets out of control. Keep an eye on which campaigns, keywords and adverts are consuming the most budget if you want to prevent spending from getting out of hand. For instance, if you see significant spend with few or no valuable conversions, you need to investigate why. Upon further assessment, you may find that:

• Keywords are too broad
• Ads are attracting irrelevant searches
• The landing page isn’t converting visitors
• Targeting needs to be refined
• Bids are too high
• Budget is being allocated to underperforming campaigns
• Conversion tracking isn’t set up properly

Regular optimisation can ensure that your PPC budget is being directed towards the areas that generate the most value. As such, this prevents your PPC budget from vanishing into thin air with no real or successful results. 

Kumo is pleased to provide a wide range of digital marketing services, including content creation, SEO, PPC, website design and more. You can rest assured that our team of dedicated experts can set you apart from your competitors with excellent content creation and copywriting services. If you’d like further information about how we can help you today, get in touch with a member of our friendly, specialist team – we’re always happy to hear from you.