When we manage our Google Ads campaigns, this conversion rate is a good indicator of overall campaign effectiveness. However, it is possible to use it to determine the effectiveness of a keyword, an ad or an audience for example. This rate is also very impacted by the landing page. Indeed, if the latter is poorly done (no indicator that encourages action for example), this rate remains low, which is why it is just as important to manage your campaigns as to create an effective landing page. If you have created your campaigns optimally but your landing page is not successful, the expected results will not be there. The landing page must be easy to read, quickly, include a clear offer, action buttons, a means of contact and more generally it must have been designed with a real marketing strategy to lead to conversion.
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- The click-through rate (CTR)
- The rate of lost impressions
- The cost per click (CPC)
- The Quality Score
- The conversion rate
- The cost per conversion
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The Google Ads network allows you to promote products, offers or even company services. It is through text ads, display, videos or even shopping that you can expose yourself. Setting up one or more campaigns, however, requires follow-up. Google Ads requires daily updates and frequent optimizations, this is the subject of our article today.
manage and optimize your google ads campaigns
It is important to understand that Google Ads is a robot that works through intersecting algorithms. Associated with artificial intelligence and its machine learning model, this robot learns from its experience and adapts according to the evolution of behavior on the Internet. This is why it is VERY important to monitor your advertising campaigns, actively manage them and optimize them so that with each update, the campaigns are more effective.
Before optimizing them, it is important to understand them, and that is what this article is all about. Let’s take a look at the main Google Ads metrics to manage and optimize.
The click-through rate (CTR)
CTR is a perfect indicator of campaign accuracy. It corresponds to the click rate, i.e. the ratio between the number of clicks and the number of displays. The latter will be able to give an indication of the consistency and precision of targeting. If your click-through rate is low, you may consider that your ad group is not targeted enough. This may be due to keywords that are too general, poorly worded ads or that simply do not correspond to the target.
Let’s take the example of a company installing sectional garage doors in the Val d’Oise. This company posted an ad for its sectional garage door offering, but the keywords target all types of garage doors, not just sectional doors. Because of this, the CTR of this ad will be low.
The more targeted the keywords and ads in your ad group, the more relevant the CTR will be. This will have an impact on your quality score, which will allow for better positioning of your ads and an optimized bid.
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- average market ctr search
- average market ctr dislay
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The rate of lost impressions
This is a metric that is often forgotten, but which nevertheless gives very relevant information on the competition as well as on your allocated budget. Lost impression rate is the number of times your ads failed to appear due to budget or competitive constraints. More simply, this rate lets you know whether or not your ad is displayed and how often. Yes, paying Google does not guarantee you to be displayed everywhere, only the best-configured campaigns are put forward, hence the interest of not rushing the creation of your Google Ads campaigns.
Let’s get back to the lost impression rate. The higher the latter, the more you will benefit from increasing your budget (if and only if the other campaign criteria are positive: CTR and conversions in particular). This indicator reveals that the budget allocated to your campaign is not optimized. Naturally, the budget is not everything: you will have to show tenacity and regularity if you want to be among the best. The budget helps but it is also your ability to properly target and configure your campaigns that will make your ads appear as much as possible on Google. The lost impression rate is directly related to the geographic area you are targeting. If this indicator is high, and you do not want to increase your budget, you can restrict the geographical area.
The cost per click (CPC)
You will notice, most of these metrics depend on each other. Generally, when one of them improves, the others follow. This is the case of the cost per click (CPC) which corresponds to the amount spent by the advertiser when a user clicks on the advertisement. It is decisive because it will indicate how much budget will remain after a click on your ad. For example, if your budget is €10 per day but the clicked keyword costs €6, you will have €4 left for your daily budget. This is why it is essential to optimize this metric: the lower it is, the more your budget will be available and the more you will be able to generate a large number of clicks at a lower cost.
At the same time, the CPC is linked to several metrics. If it drops, there will be more budget available to be able to display your ad on the targeted keywords. This logically results in a lower lost impression rate since your budget will be better distributed.
The Quality Score
This indicator determines the quality score of a keyword, which is based on: the relevance of the latter, the quality of the landing page and the quality of the ads. The higher the general quality score, the more Google highlights your ads, hence the importance of managing and optimizing your Google Ads campaigns as often as possible (campaign optimization is changing with the new cookie and GDPR regulations ).
The latter, like the previous metrics, is linked to the others. Indeed, the higher the quality score, the lower the CPC, and we have by the principle of causality, a lower rate of lost impressions.
The conversion rate
Here we get to the heart of the matter: conversions, leads, contacts! The conversion rate is simply the ratio between the number of clicks on the ad and the number of conversion actions carried out. More simply, it allows you to determine the overall effectiveness of your advertising campaign: the higher this rate, the more effective your communication actions are (if your objective is conversion of course).
The cost per conversion
Similar to CPC, cost per conversion is the cost spent on a conversion. This metric is decisive because it tells you how much you spend on a conversion, a contact, an action. This allows you to assess whether the communication actions you carry out are profitable for you.
The nuance with the ROI
A nuance to ABSOLUTELY take into account: the cost per conversion does not correspond to the return on investment. ROI is what you earn after deducting all the costs used to arrive at a result. There are two things to know:
1- A conversion can be equal to an event, a click, a quote request, a call etc… whereas the ROI truly represents
2- You have to rely on the ROI to determine if the cost per conversion is high or not. For example, a customer who has an average basket of €5,000 will find it appropriate to have a cost per conversion of €250.
Google Ads is changing day by day and so are the metric standards. The performance of an online advertising action via Google services greatly depends on the knowledge of the tools and the degree of expertise on the subject. Calling on a Google Ads expert allows you to improve your marketing performance.