What distinguishes expert Google Ads professionals from novices is their ability to decipher metrics and make decisions accordingly. Metrics, much like a double-edged sword, can easily mislead the inexperienced. That’s why it’s crucial to scrutinize metrics from both positive and negative perspectives.
There are two ways to do this: First option, gain accumulated experience with hundreds of thousands of dollars in spending; Second option, read this post and the subsequent ones.
1st Metric – Impression Share
The Bright Side: A gradual increase in impression share signifies that you’ve entered the competition and earned a slice of the cake.
Action: Keep a vigilant eye.
The Dark Side: A sudden surge in impression share may signal that your ad is being triggered by irrelevant or useless keywords or targeting the wrong audience.
Action: A decline in impression share isn’t necessarily bad if it aligns with your true prospects. Continuously review everything, refine keywords, expand your negative list, and narrow down your audience if necessary.
2nd Metric – Click-Through Rate (CTR)
The Bright Side: CTR is the measure of success of your persuasive language; it indicates people are captivated by your text.
Action: Follow up by checking the conversion rate. If the percentage aligns with the CTR, it means your landing page structure (content, UI, UX) was consistent with your promises (headlines, descriptions, callouts).
The Dark Side: Fancy language may lead to a high CTR but could result in losing money if what follows the clicks isn’t of the same quality.
Action: Create your formula to correlate CTR with the conversion rate. If they rise together, you’re on the right track. However, if CTR is increasing while the conversion rate isn’t, stop everything because you’re heading straight to HELL.
3rd Metric – Cost/Conversion
The Bright Side: One of the most rewarding moments for Google Ads professionals is when the first phase of managing campaigns concludes, usually after an average of three months. Then, a new challenge takes place, which is trying various tactics to lower the cost per conversion.
Action: When it happens, reward yourself and break your diet.
The Dark Side: Congratulations cost / conv. is getting low. But let me depress you for a second by asking what about impression share, CTR, no. of total conversion, Invalid clicks rate, Search lost IS (rank), targeting location, targeted keywords, leads quality..etc??
Action: If adjusting the above factors raises the cost per conversion again, do it because you’re getting back on the right track.
These three metrics are a kind of a non-exhaustive list that should include many other metrics. After a couple of months of building and optimizing campaigns, your primary job is to analyze them and make informed decisions to continually enhance overall performance.
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