Google AdWords is a powerful way to drive immediate traffic to your offers. Done correctly, AdWords can act as the cornerstone of your advertising strategy, greatly amplifying ROI from other marketing efforts.
As with anything in digital marketing, however, it’s important to have measurable goals. If you don’t capture and analyze data throughout your campaign, you won’t be able to optimize your efforts. That can mean wasted money and limited progress.
To raise your odds of success, focus on these metrics:
Clickthrough Rate
Clickthrough rate is one of the essential factors for all digital advertising – it can be seen as the basic measure of success. Clickthrough percentage is calculated by dividing the number of people who clicked on your ad by the number who saw it during a given time period. High clickthrough indicates a compelling, well-written ad: The first step toward reaching any sales goal.
Quality Score
Quality Score is assigned on a per-keyword basis and is a main determinant in how much it costs to run ads for a given keyword. Quality Score also helps you appear in the more visible positions on the screen. Ensuring each ad goes to a relevant landing page is the key to Quality Score, since the amount of time each user spends on the page can raise or lower the score substantially.
Conversion Rate
Conversion Rate tells you how many of the users you attract are truly helping you reach your goal. A purchase is the most sought-after conversion, but signing up for a mailing list or making a phone call are valuable forms of conversion elsewhere in the buyer journey. If an ad gets a great clickthrough rate but few conversions, its landing page may need to be adjusted.
Keywords
Keyword research should be one of the earliest steps in any campaign – since it informs you about your prospects’ needs, it often precedes product development. In AdWords, each of your ads is associated with a specific keyword. When ads underperform, a mismatch between what you expect from a keyword and what users are thinking is the first thing to investigate. Take a look at what search terms are actually converting.
Google’s free Google Analytics product is an enterprise-grade analytics suite for evaluating website traffic, user behavior, and the impact of paid advertising on your business goals. Before you implement AdWords, you should have Google Analytics deployed on your e-commerce site. Its Conversion Tracking Tool is especially helpful for measuring your advertising ROI.
No other PPC option can help your business access such a broad spectrum of Internet users as AdWords. Still, it’s not without risk. From the start, a rigorous approach is the key. Monitor metrics, make changes, and test possibilities. Before long, you’ll find a strategy that works for your business.