Managing Your PPC Campaigns

Managing Your PPC Campaigns and Measuring Results

Once you set your PPC campaign running, you’ll probably be tempted to look at it every few minutes. In fact, large PPC campaigns have to be monitored almost continually. If you are paying half a million or a million dollars a month on PPC ads, you’ll probably want to ensure that things are running smoothly. The average small-business owner doesn’t have time to do this, of course. But you can’t just walk away either, and then come back a month later. PPC campaigns take work; you need to see where your ads are sitting—if they drop too low you won’t get any clicks. Keep an eye of the click cost, and, most importantly, figure out your Return on Investment. Viewing PPC Results The first thing you’ll want to do is view the results of your PPC campaign. Begin by logging into your AdWords account. The very first screen you see will show you a quick summary of each of your campaigns

Clicks- The total number of clicks on all the ads included in the campaign, for all the keyword
matches.

Impr.- The total number of impressions—that is, the total number of times that the campaign’s
ads were displayed on a web page.

CTR- The click-through rate—the percent of ads that were clicked on. If the CTR is
0.5 percent, your ads were clicked on once for every 200 times they were displayed.
(Not an uncommon rate.)

Avg. CPC- The average price you paid for a click.

Cost- The total amount of money you spent for this campaign.

Conv. Rate & Cost/Conv.- These columns are not enabled initially; rather, you’ll see a promotional blurb for the tracking service. We’ll look at this under the section “Entering Conversion Values” later in this chapter. These are Conversion Rate and Cost Per Conversion, showing you how many clicks turned into sales. A campaign summary is useful, but you can’t use it to carefully manage a PPC campaign. You also need to see how each keyword and each ad performs. Click the name of the campaign, and you’ll now see a similar table, this time showing summaries for each ad group in the campaign 

Keyword  The statistics for a particular keyword—that is, the cost of the click through when the ad was displayed after being matched with that keyword, and so on

Status There are four possibilities: Normal: Your ads are being matched with this keyword. In trial: Your ads are still being matched with this keyword, but may not be soon (see the section titled “Managing Bad CTRs” later in this chapter). On hold: Your ads are not being matched with this keyword any longer, though they may be if Google runs out of ads that perform better.Disabled: Your ads will no longer be matched with this keyword.

Max. CPC Your maximum bid for this keyword

Clicks The total number of clicks your ads receive after being matched with this keyword 

Impr. The total number of impressions—that is, the total number of times that the ads were displayed—after being matched with this keyword

Ctr The click-through rate—the percent of ads that were clicked after being matched with this keyword. Very low click-through rates will lead to this keyword being disabled.

Avg. CPC The average price you paid for a click after the ad is matched with this keyword Cost The total amount of money you spent for ads matched with this keyword

Avg. Pos The average position your ad occupied once matched with this keyword

Conv. Rate & Cost/Conv. See the section “Entering Conversion Values” later in this chapter for information on Conversion Rate and Cost Per Conversion.