Paid ads are a gamble, one that many businesses are hesitant to try. If you don’t use them right, you can lose out on a lot of money, so you need to keep track of how they’re doing. Many businesses focus squarely on cost-per-click, but that’s not always the best way to determine ad success. When there are many ways to understand how your ads are doing, you should be familiar with most, if not all of them.
The Importance of Tracking Your Paid Ads
If you don’t keep track of how well your ads are doing, you are setting yourself up to lose money. You have to keep track of everything in your ads, not just the cost per click. When you only track the cost per click, you make decisions about your content solely in the pursuit of lowering it. When you do that, you put impressions, clicks, click-thru-rate, and more to the side, letting them go to make your CPC go down. You have to look at your complete ad performance before you focus on one thing.
What Paid Ad Metrics Do You Need to Pay Attention to?
When you’re running paid ads, whether it be on Google, Bing, Facebook, or LinkedIn, there are metrics that you cannot ignore. If you do, you run the risk of losing money and missing out on viable leads. Even if your paid ads are only to build up brand awareness, operating based on the wrong metrics can lead to you missing out on your target audience.
Paid ad platforms give you half a dozen metrics that you can use to follow your ad performance. Here are the ones that you would be mistaken to ignore.
Impressions
Paid ads, especially on Google, Bing, and other search engines, are the best at getting impressions. Impressions are whenever someone looks at your ad when they’re online. This tells you how many different people and search terms actually match the keyword and advanced keyword settings you have.
If your impressions are not high, you need to rethink what keywords you want to go after. You could have a lot of clicks and low impressions. That means that you’re missing out on a lot more clicks too.
Clicks
Clicks are how many people who see your paid ad click on it to get to your landing page or website. How high or low your clicks are, tells you how attractive your ad content is. If people are clicking on your ad, then your content looks and/or sounds good. If not, then you know you have to rework and edit your ad content until you find something that attracts people to click on your ads.
Click-thru Rate
The click-thru rate is how many of your ads impressions turned into clicks. This is a way to put into perspective how effective your ads are. If your clicks are high, but your impressions are even higher, then your ads may not actually be so good, just your keywords.
The average click-thru rate is 4% to 6%, so if yours is a lot lower than that, your ads may not be performing as well as they could be. Just because an ad is performing well for you, doesn’t mean you’re not leaving leads on the table.
The Different Types of Ad Cost
Different ad sites have different metrics for measuring their ad performances. The metrics your ad tracks are based on how the ads are paid for. Most are pay-per-click (PPC). This is where paid ad platforms charge advertisers based on how many people click on the ad, rather than how many people see it, but this is not the only type.
- Cost-per-click: When an ad is PPC, the cost metric is measured by how much you needed to pay during that click to outbid other advertisers bidding on your keyword at that time. If you and multiple advertisers are bidding on one keyword, the one who bids the most within their budget will get the best spot for the keyword, but it will be the maximum bid before you go over budget.
- Cost-per-mille: A mille in this instance is a thousand impressions. It still uses the same system as CPC, where the one who bids the most will get the best spot for a keyword. The cost is separated by impressions instead. This way you can see how much it costs to get brand awareness.
- Cost-per-action: An action is when someone signs up on your landing page–a lead–or makes a sales purchase. This still uses the same bidding system and allows you to track how much it cost you to make a sale.
Get Help With Your Paid Ads From ENX2 Legal Marketing
Paid ads are complicated and it’s easy to make a mistake that costs your business a sizable chunk of change. Instead of trying to understand something completely different from your profession, let marketing professionals do it for you.
With ENX2 Legal Marketing’s help, you can focus on what you do best, and run your day-to-day business. We’ll keep you fully informed as to your paid ads performance with the metrics we’ve mentioned. If this is the kind of help you need, contact ENX2 Legal Marketing today.