In online marketing, it's not just about succeeding with your campaigns, ideas, posts, and pages, but more importantly, how you come to success. Only if you use your Key Performance Indicators understand and read correctly, you have a chance to work really efficiently.
Google Ads provide you with a number of tools to do this, allowing you to read in great detail what actions are impacting your site. If you use these Understand key figures better, then you can more easily optimize and find weak points in your campaigns. In this overview, we show you what the key figures mean for you and what is particularly important.
Google Ads and the most important key figures at a glance
Clicks
Of course nothing goes without the Click count. Still, the mass of clicks is an important indicator that your ads are working. After all, visits to your site are the first step to customer acquisition.
Click-through rate
Through the CTR (click-through rate) shows the ratio between displayed ads and clicks. How many users see your ad and click through to your page. A low CTR on your ad can mean that your content is not engaging enough or is being shown to the wrong users.
Using the average values of different ad types, you can determine the Assess the quality of your campaign. What a good CTR actually is is difficult to generalize. As a guideline, one lies with a Click rate from 1% quite well. However, it depends on many factors. For display campaigns, the click-through rates are usually much lower, values of 0.5% are already very good here, while search campaigns with brand keywords should achieve a higher CTR (at least 3%).
Click costs
To Return on investment to see, you need not only a high CTR, but also a CPC as low as possible (Cost per Click). With a maximum bid, you can cap your click costs, but of course your goal is to stay below the maximum bid. Lower cost per click also means lower cost per conversion and that allows you to go further and further with your budget.
Display position
Where your ad ranks is not only a success factor in itself, but should always be considered in relation to other metrics. For example, whether your click-through rate is really good depends heavily on the ad rank.
Of course, a higher ad rank will cost you more, here you always have to check if it brings enough RoI.
Conversion Rate
All marketing expenses are of course null and void without the appropriate Conversion Rate. Only when you can turn your campaign into clicks and ultimately sales will you have long-term success.
Compare which ads and keywords have the best conversion rates and what differences there are in target audiences.
A average conversion rate is between 2-4%but this value should be taken with a grain of salt. Specialized industries can have conversion rates up to 30%.
If their conversion rate is significantly lower, you need to look for Causes for the bounce rate research. When is the purchase decision revised? On the store side? At the payment procedures? The Conversion Rate Optimization offers you an approach to optimization.
However, it is also true here that a lower conversion rate with higher visitor numbers may not be particularly efficient, but still brings in more profit due to the higher spread value - especially if the margin per conversion is correspondingly high.
Cost per conversion
Marketing budgets through all industries usually have one thing in common: they are never as high as they should be. Accordingly, it's important to focus all campaigns on Cost per conversion to optimize. A good cost per conversion is also very dependent on your company and conversions. If you sell a product for 10€, a cost per conversion of 40€ is obviously not a good value. The bigger your conversion value is (and the bigger your margin with it), the higher the cost per conversion can be.
Learning to use Smart Bidding - new metrics make Google Ads even more flexible
With the new Google Ads metrics, you have even more chances to target your campaigns in a more refined and detailed way. The new metrics include device, location, day of the week, time of day, and keyword.
So you have with the right bid signals even higher chances of converting search queries into conversions. Device and location are particularly important for the local trade important indicators, as they allow to target customers in the vicinity and make them offers. The day of the week also allows for more refined bidding strategies, both for local and international offers.
Restaurants can thus for example defined in time and space advertise with the lunch menu or even send discount codes, digital services can be more closely aligned with the time of day. Customers are then more likely to see entertainment offers in the evening, the longing for long-distance travel is awakened on the way to work - the possibilities of these new identification signals are manifold and customers can also be informed in this way about more relevant Google Ads look forward
Google Ads is not an island
However, there is one important mistake you should never make when dealing with Google Ads and that is the Viewing your marketing campaigns as a closed microcosm. Especially if the click-through rate actually delivers promising results and your ad rank is also right, but the conversions are failing, you should broaden your view.
Is the landing page really up to date? How easy is it for customers to get to the desired product after clicking? Are there gross discrepancies between the campaign and the landing page?
It is not for nothing that the Keyword Quality Score among the most important indicators in Google Ads. This metric looks at click-through rate, ad relevance, and quality of the landing page. Even well-functioning campaigns can fail here if their content is misleading, for example.
To give a negative example: a site that wants to sell an eBook places ads on a popular keyword like "lose weight fast". The page itself, however, is disastrously designed, offers only bad stock photos and even before the content is loaded, the user's email is to be grabbed. This is, of course, the extreme example, but it shows very nicely, how important in SEA also technical and qualitative SEO measures are.
But with Google Ads metrics, you have full control over your campaigns and can compare successes and failures, increase bids, and retarget ads. You should definitely take advantage of these diverse opportunities.
