Ok, so your campaigns are up and running and you’ve worked out your bid strategy. Now, you can move onto one of the most essential parts of your PPC campaigns - optimization. You should constantly be monitoring your campaigns, and there are a number of metrics you can use to get an idea of how your ads are performing…

The first one we should mention is pretty simple - cost per click, which is the amount you pay for each click on your ad. Then there’s click-through rate, which looks at how many people clicked on your ad when they had the opportunity to do so. Another metric is your conversion rate, which is how many people fulfilled one of your goals as a result of clicking on your ad - like buying something or signing up to an email.

You can also look at cost per acquisition, or CPA, which is a metric that measures the total cost of a customer completing an action that leads to a conversion. Finally, there’s return on ad spend, or ROAS, which looks at how much money you’re making, in return for the amount you invested.

Along with these metrics, you should also take a ‘test and learn’ approach. It’s crucial to monitor your results closely and then test different copy, landing pages and keywords to see if you can make any improvements. Google can actually help you do this, with its options for responsive search ads and automated bidding. And, the ability to create multiple ads per campaign will also help you test different elements for each ad too.

Say you’re trying to increase your quality score. If it’s ad relevance that’s holding you back, your ad copy might need tweaking so it relates more to the search query, or you might find the keywords you’re using would be better suited to a different ad. If your click-through rate is lower than expected, you might look at changing the call to action included in your ad description. Finally, if your landing page experience is poor, you might test different copy and you should check that the page is mobile friendly and loads quickly enough.

The final thing we should mention before we sign off for this lesson is attribution. Many site visitors from PPC ads don’t convert on their first visit. Just because someone clicks on an ad and goes through to your website doesn’t mean they’re going to buy something straight away. They might come back later - maybe via social media, or an email - and then make a purchase, but you’ll still want to know that PPC had an impact on bringing them to your site in the first place.

This is where attribution comes in, where you decide how much credit to assign to each touchpoint that leads up to a conversion.

Evaluation & Optimization