Key PPC Metrics
- Impressions - this number is basically the number of times your ad as been shown in search results once someone has searched something
- Clicks - these are the number of clicks on to your landing page (this is what you pay for - pay per click)
- Click through rate - also known as CTR - this is the % people that saw the ad and clicked through to your landing page
- Cost per click - also known as CPC - this gives you an average of how much you're spending per click on your ad - total spend/number of clicks
- Leads - this is also known as 'conversions' and is form fills or phone calls from your ad/landing page. Your vendor will use a call tracking phone number to track phone calls.
- Cost per lead - also may be shown as cost per conversion. This is the number of leads or conversions divided by your total spend. Again reference unique vs. duplicate
- Conversion rate - this metric shows you how well your landing page is performing in terms of lead generation. It's the % people that clicked through to your landing page and became a lead. Your landing page is built to convert clicks into leads - this is a number you want to work with your vendor to optimize (or increase)
Other Areas to Consider for a Successful PPC Campaign
Campaign Objective
Franchisees’ main objective of PPC is Lead Generation while maintaining a healthy cost of sale.
Budget Seasonality
Work with your PPC provider to establish a budget that takes in to consideration minimum levels of investment during lower seasons and more investment during higher seasons (back to school, exam etc.) when all competitors are active outside in the field chasing leads.
IMPORTANT: You should never pause or stop your PPC campaigns or you will risk losing leads to your competitors.
Meetings & Reports
Schedule Campaign check ups with your PPC vendor at the beginning of every season or whenever you feel your campaigns need a revision or a tweak, and establish with your provider a report format to keep track of how your campaigns are performing every month. You can click here to get a walkthrough of our 3 major PPC vendors reports/dashboards >>
Keywords
Yours and your competitors’. All keywords and their combinations have a different cost based on volume of population searching for them, and competitors bidding on them, causing the cost of some keywords to be higher than others.
Customized Landing Page
This is what your leads see after they click the ad. Your PPC landing page is an unindexed webpage (i.e. not crawled by Google for organic search). The goal of your landing pages are to convert clicks into leads. Your PPC vendor should offer a landing page customized to what is being offered in your ads for optimum conversion results.
Quality Score
It has direct impact on the cost and indicates how compatible your page content is with your campaign keywords. The higher your Quality Score the lower you’ll have to pay for your ads to get a top position. Example: An ad promoting Math or English Tutoring that leads to a generic landing page will have a lower score and would have to pay more than an ad leading to a page with specific content on these subjects.
Ad Copy & CTA (Call To Action)
The copy of your ad should be relevant and use the natural language and keywords your customers use when doing web searches. The CTA of the Ad or Landing Page must be appealing enough to make the Conversion and can be anything from “Book a Free Consultation” to “Get 20% OFF”.
A/B (or Split) Testing
The goal of A/B or split testing is to continually optimize various areas of your campaign (CTR, Conversion Rate etc.) Talk to your PPC vendor about running split testing alternating versions of Ad Copy, Images, or CTA during the campaign and keep the mix of elements that have the best performance.