When it comes to marketing, the money is in the metrics. Tracked metrics give marketers the ability to show their value to organizations worldwide as well as the ability to optimize and make strategic decisions regarding their active campaigns.
So What are the core metrics you need to know? Impressions, Impression Share, Average Position, Clicks, CTR, CPC, Cost, Conversions, Conversion Rate, and CPA.
Let’s Get Started…
What are Impressions?
We aren’t talking about a quality Christopher Walken impression here, because we all know for good Walken Impression you just need to emphasize on those pauses… 😊
An *impression in the digital marketing world is recorded when a user performs a search on any one of the keywords associated with you ad account and your ad actually appears within the search.
Basically impressions are how many users could have potentially viewed your ad. This would be similar to putting up a billboard and asking how much traffic was on the street that day? Expect much better tracking from Google Ads, but it’s an easy analogy.
*Impression Share sounds just like what it is. This is the percentage of time your ads actually displayed compared to how much they could have appear or were eligible to appear. This is a good marker for how you are comparing with your primary competitors
What is the Average Position?
This one is super easy. This simply tells you what part of the page your ad actually came up on. Give yourself a good goal and stay in the top 3-4 ad positions to maximize results.
Clicks, Clicks, and More Clicks!
Clicks are paramount in digital marketing. The goal is to get people on your website, calling you, or learning more about your prouts and services, so they have to click right?!
*Clicks are easy to explain. If a user sees your ad (impression) and clicks on your ad, then bam! You have yourself a measured click, nice and simple. They can use their finger, their nose, their cursor or toes, it doesn’t matter if they engage with that ad, it is going to be tracked!
*Click Through Rates (CTR) are very important as it tells you how well your ads are working. If you are getting ads to show, but users are not clicking you could have a problem with your copy or you maybe just aren’t targeting the proper keywords to be relevant in this users search!
What about Cost?
*Cost is simple, it is how much you paid for your ads to show.
This is how much you spent on your ads. This can be broken down by campaign, ad group, or even individual ads and keywords. This is how marketers demonstrate their cost allocation for different products and services that being marketed.
What is a Conversion?
Conversion has a definition, but in reality it means something different for most businesses. A conversion can be defined as the metric that is recorded once a user clicks on your ads and then takes an action that your business deems valuable. This could be generating a lead, getting a new follow, having someone purchase an item, and the list literally could go on and on and on.
Tracking conversion is one of the most important factors when it comes to PPC because it is how you will demonstrate an ROI to your client, manager, or yourself!
*Conversion Rate is simple. How many people clicked on your ad versus how many people took the necessary conversion action.
*Cost Per Conversion / Aquisition (CPA) is simple as well, but extremely important. You need to know how much you are paying to get these conversions so you know if you are making money off your marketing. CPA can be calculated using the below formula:
Learning these metrics can be extremely helpful for you as a marketer or for you as a business owner. This allows you the ability to hold your marketing team accountable.
Knowing these metrics is not enough if you are a marketer, you need to know what actions you can take to increase or decrease certain metrics and you absolutely need to know how to tie these together to give you insights into how your marketing is doing at all stages of the game!
