PPC Tracking: A Comprehensive Guide [2022]

The setup of your pay-per-click (PPC) campaign is only the first step.

The next step is to track your PPC ad results so you may fine-tune your paid search campaign and achieve the desired outcomes.

PPC tracking is a time-consuming but worthwhile procedure that may help you create traffic to your site and increase sales, whether you manage an eCommerce business or a startup.

In fact, 33% of marketers in 2020 employed paid promotion to increase brand awareness!

We’re here to help if you’re new to PPC tracking and have questions.

We’ll cover all you need to know about PPC tracking in this piece, including critical metrics to track and more.

What Is PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Tracking?

The technique of tracking your pay-per-click campaign and its performance is known as PPC tracking.

Monitoring metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) that inform you how successful your campaign is are included.

These stats will provide you with a clear picture of what works and what doesn’t for your adverts. For instance, which keywords are effective or which advertisements get the most traffic.

8 Key Metrics to Track When Monitoring Pay-Per-Click Ads

While Google allows you to check various KPIs, here are the eight most important metrics to monitor to guarantee that your PPC advertisements are producing the results you desire.

1. Impressions
The number of times your ad was displayed on search engine result pages is known as impressions (SERPs). If Google shows your ad five times on a given day, your ad has received five impressions for that day. Keep in mind that this number does not necessarily correspond to the number of individuals who saw your ad; it simply indicates how many times it was shown.

2. Impression share
The impression share of your ad compares to that of your competitors.

Impression share also keeps track of how much competition there is for a given keyword or PPC ad campaign.

Divide the number of impressions your ad received by the total number of impressions your ad was qualified to receive to get your impression share.

For instance, if your ad was qualified to appear 50 times in SERPs but only appeared 10 times, your impression share is 20%.

3. Click-Through Rate and Clicks

The amount of persons who clicked on your ad is referred to as clicks.

While clicks are a simple indicator, click-through rate (CTR) reveals how relevant your ad is to users.

The impressions that result in a click are represented by click-through rates.

Divide the number of clicks by the number of individuals who viewed your ad (impressions) and multiply by 100 to get your CTR.

Your CTR is 0.2 percent if your ad receives 500 impressions and one click.

There are two sorts of click-through rates: (1)

Users find your PPC ads relevant and engaging, resulting in a high CTR.
Low CTR: Users don’t find your PPC advertising interesting or relevant.

4. Conversions and conversion rate

Users convert when they click on your ad and do the action you want them to take, such as buying your product or service.

The percentage of users who convert after clicking on one of your adverts is known as conversion rates.

In other words, conversion rates provide a more accurate picture of how many people are buying your products.

Divide the number of clicks by the number of conversions and multiply by 100 to get your conversion rates.

So, if 100 people click on your ad and 10 of them convert, your conversion rate is 10%.

5. Average CPC (Cost Per Click)

When a user clicks on one of your adverts, you pay a cost-per-click (CPC).

Divide your total cost of clicks by the total number of clicks your ad has received to get your average CPC.

When a user clicks on your ad, the result is how much you’ll be charged.

6. Average Position

The average position of your adverts on search engine results pages (SERPs) defines how well they compete with other ads. Ads show at the top and bottom of search results, giving them more exposure.

To get your ads to the top of the SERPs, follow these steps:

Boost your Ad Rank by incorporating relevant brand information and generating advertisements with site links or extensions that allow consumers to visit your site directly from Google Ads.
Use appropriate keywords to ensure your adverts are relevant.
Make your bid competitive by making sure it’s high enough to compete against other advertisers bidding on the same keywords as you. A bid is an offer made in a pay-per-click auction to ensure that your ad appears at the top of search engine results pages.

7. Quality Score

On a scale of one (lowest) to ten (best), Google rates the quality of your ads and keywords (highest).

Your click-through rate, the average cost per click, and the bid amount are all elements that determine your ad’s quality score.

8. Return of ad spend (ROAS)

The revenue gained for every dollar spent on your ad is known as return on ad spend (ROAS).

Divide the profit from your ad campaign by the cost to calculate your ROAS.

For example, if your PPC ad campaign on Google generated $800 in revenue and cost you $100 to run, you made a $8 profit for every $1 spent.

What Is the Importance of PPC Tracking?

The benefits of PPC tracking range from analyzing the performance of your pay-per-click ads to guaranteeing that they generate purchases.

1. Assists you in determining which keywords and advertisements are most effective.

You can only see the surface-level performance of your advertising if you don’t track conversions, such as how many impressions and clicks they get.

While knowing your impressions and clicks is important for understanding your users’ interests, if you don’t track your conversions, you won’t know which advertisements are producing leads and driving sales for your company.

Conversion tracking allows you to see which keywords and advertising are assisting your PPC campaigns in driving conversions.

You may then tweak and make the required adjustments after you know which of your ads are doing successfully. Modifications could include:

The underperforming adverts are paused or deleted.
Creating Google-generated advertisements or dynamic search ads that target appropriate searches based on your user’s search
Ad wording that corresponds to search terms
To make your keywords more relevant, divide them into categories (for example, if you sell wine bottles, you might have a set of keywords for “red wine” and “white wine”).

2. Enables you to collect data

What was your past month’s click-through rate? Or the previous year?

PPC tracking is vital because it helps you to collect data that shows you what measures to take next to achieve your objectives, whether they are to increase conversions, get leads, improve brand awareness, or drive visitors to your website.

Furthermore, if you engage a PPC agency to manage your ads, they will have access to your past data, which will assist them in:

Make your budget fit your objectives and make sure your advertising dollars are well spent.
Make a plan to improve your PPC marketing campaigns in the future.
Contact the best Google AdWords agency to fix your conversion tracking.

PPC Tracking Limitations

To analyze your PPC ad success and guarantee you’re interacting with your target audience, you’ll need to track crucial indicators.

However, PPC tracking alone is insufficient to fully comprehend the value of your marketing plan and its impact on sales.

Here are three drawbacks of PPC tracking:

1. Call tracking for PPC is not standardized

Call conversion (people who call you) can be measured through PPC ads, but calls can also come from organic search (non-paid results on SERPs) or other channels like social media or your website.

Let’s say you have a Google PPC ad. While you may track calls from advertisements (those made directly from your ads), you may also receive calls from organic searches or social media.

So tracking only PPC calls won’t give you the whole picture.

2. No recording of call quality

You can track the length of your calls (for example, 30 seconds), but not how many of those callers converted.

For example, if 100 people call after seeing your ad but only 60 of them locate what they’re searching for, only 40% of those people are high-quality leads or your most likely conversion prospects.

What about the other 60% of those who dialed?

If they don’t locate what they’re looking for, they’ll be regarded as low-quality leads who are unlikely to buy from your company.

While your PPC stats may say things like “You had 100 calls from your ad today!” they don’t say things like “Unfortunately, 60% of those callers are low-quality leads.”

3. Leads do not guarantee a sale.

According to a 2018 survey, paid search advertising was the quickest way to get information online for 75% of people.

This statistic demonstrates that individuals are more likely to click on Google text ads that answer their questions, helping your ad to generate leads.

While PPC tracking can follow your leads via tracking URLs, you won’t know how many of those leads convert.

PPC Tracking Key Takeaways

PPC tracking helps you to track the performance of your PPC advertising, gain insight into what’s working and what isn’t, discover areas for improvement, and collect data for future campaigns.

While PPC tracking is beneficial, you can’t rely on its primary indicators to provide a clear picture of how your marketing plan is progressing.

You’ll need to analyze your advertising and keywords, keep optimizing them, track conversions, and follow up on leads.

How to prepare the perfect Google Ads campaign structure

There are many tools for advertising products and services across the Internet, but Google Ads remains the most common and effective one. With a proper digital marketing strategy and consistent approach advertisement via Google Ads will suit any niche and can make a huge impact on the business (in form of revenue or customer retention as well). See how our Google Ads agency do it.

However, for your ads to be efficient, it is necessary to ensure that each ad campaign is properly structured according to its type. Numerous targeting options and settings must be carefully selected and adjusted so as not to waste money instead of making a profit. 

In this article, we are going to consider my favorite proven method of organizing ad campaigns that will definitely bring you the expected result. Let’s make your ads work for you!

SKAG: FUNDAMENTALS OF THE METHOD 

The essence of a SKAG (ad group with one keyword) is based on grouping keywords in such a way as to put only one keyword in one ad group in three match types: exact, phrase, and broad match modifier. 

Putting keywords exactly in three-match types is an important point. In this way, our keyword will resemble the user’s search query as much as possible. It, in turn, will help to increase ad relevance, while reducing cost per click. Google displays ads on the keyword that is most similar to a search query, and therefore the cheapest one.

Why is it needed? Resorting to SKAG structuring method means paying maximum attention to ad relevance. It is achieved through the use of keywords in the headlines and ad text for each ad group. In such a way, your ads will look more “customized” to the user. User-tailored advertising will have a competitive advantage, which will definitely increase CTR (click-through-rate). 

Quick Tip: When creating an ad campaign in Ads Editor, go to expanded text ads and highlight all ads. Enter any value in Headline 1 (e.g. “111”). Click Ctrl+H and in the opened tab put your value. Replace this value with [Adgroup]. Done! Now each of your ads has a keyword in Headline 1. 

Well, regarding keywords is clear, but how many ads should be in each group? 

As Google Ads Help says: “Every ad group should have at least 3 quality ads. That way, the system can optimize your performance, and you can check your performance data to learn what message resonates best with your audience.”

Since SKAG is focused on the relevance of the ads – 3 options are the optimal number. Try to make them different to keep track of user needs. In addition to this rule, I will give you a little useful advice. Use dynamic headline insertion {KeyWord} in one of three ads. Dynamic keyword insertion allows calling the Keyword for which the ad was shown. If the keyword is too long, the user will be shown an alternative, suggested by you. All these small details can greatly improve your ad performance.

Quick Tip: Do not forget to mention your unique and valuable propositions in the descriptions as well as distinctive features. 

TOP 3 ADVANTAGES OF SKAG STRUCTURE

SKAG is a favorite ad campaign structure for many skilled PPC Specialists.  All thanks to its relatively fast setup and high efficiency. But there are other reasons as well. Here they are:

Ease of managing and optimization.

You can easily assess the performance of each separate keyword in its ad group. Let’s imagine you have adgroup with the keyword buy chocolate in three match types. Most likely that this keyword in broad modifier will spend a lot of money since it will be shown on search terms mentioning your brand, the brand of your competitors, and the different types of chocolates you can sell or not. 

After analyzing the statistics, you can turn it off over time without significant losses in transactions, since this keyword will continue to work in two other match types. You can also easily make a decision about excluding entire groups of keywords if they do not show the required effectiveness.

Quick Tip: To prevent budget leakage, carefully gather negative keywords at the stage of collecting semantics. Do not forget to update this list every day by analyzing search terms.

Flexible bid management.

Most business niches have very few keywords with minimal competition level. It means that if the proper level of control over rates is not ensured, the budget will be wasted. In turn, by setting bids correctly, you can attract profitable traffic. In order to set bids correctly, the conversion of the website, the marginality of the products, as well as the auction insights data should be taken into account.

Quick Tip: Add a “Search lost top impression share (budget)” column on the keyword level to get insightful information of how efficient your bids are. The more the percentage – the less effective your bids.

Increased number of сonversions due to improved CTR

You know CTR reflects the ratio of clicks to impressions. With the most relevant ads and the correct bids, you will be able to achieve excellent CTR. Further maths is simple – the more clicks, the more conversions. Then you can work to retain customers.

Quick Tip: Make sure your website is well optimized and has a fast page loading speed, otherwise users who come from ads will leave without any purchases.

A FEW MORE DETAILS FOR THE PERFECT AD CAMPAIGN

When the basic structure is ready it is only half of the success. One insignificant detail that many people overlook so often can greatly increase your campaign CTR. This detail calls extension. With the help of extensions, you can make your advertisements as detailed as possible by placing more useful information there. 

Extensions help to increase the CTR, bringing the most relevant traffic to the website. It is achieved due to the fact that all the data the user needs at the initial stages of the funnel will be already displayed in the ad. This will make it easier for users to decide whether to visit your site. Below we will talk about the most common and effective extensions for your ads.

Sitelink 

This extension is the most important one.  Firstly, site links make your ad more noticeable in search results (as it will take up more space), so users will definitely take a look at your ad. Secondly, placing more links with descriptions can increase traffic, since the user may not be interested in the page to which the advertisement leads, but it may be interested in some other one mentioned in the extension. 

Important note: In the search result, 4 links will be displayed. Place at least 4 links at the extension to fill the maximum space under the ad. The more links you include to the site link extension – the more possibilities Google will have to identify and show the most performing ones.

Callout and structure snippet

Both of these extensions aim at providing the users with all data connected with offered products and services. Thus, making incoming traffic more relevant. Put in callouts values and unique features of your business, letting the user understand why you should be chosen among competitors. In structured snippets, particular aspects of the products or services provided by the company should be disclosed.

Important note: Create as many callouts as possible, preferably not less than 8. Regarding structure snippets – 2 will be enough.

Call 

This extension will be useful, especially in cases where the purchase can be made not only through the website but also by phone. The call is very convenient because users can call immediately from the search results without clicking on the ad, which saves your money. 

Important note:  The possibility to call from search results only available from mobile devices, so do not forget to select mobile devices as preferable.

Price

Due to this extension users can see the price of your products, and if the price suits, they can immediately go to the product card and buy it. If the price is not suitable, then you will not pay for a non-relevant click.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Of course, there are other ways to structure an advertising campaign, but this one has already proven its effectiveness many times in a row. It is also commonly used not only for search campaigns but for shopping (in this case it is called SPAG) and display as well. The essence is similar, the only difference is that shopping will have products instead of keywords, and a display campaign will have audiences. In addition to all the written above, this method is one of the easiest, not to mention the fact that you can master it yourself and easily teach others. 

However, the setup of the ad campaign, even if perfectly structured – is only half the road to success. Proper optimization requires much more knowledge and the right decisions. So always evaluate your capabilities, or contact a specialist to sleep well knowing that your ad is in good hands.