There are over 500 metrics in Google Ads, most of them are obscure, and the ones that are useful often lack context, making it difficult to grasp how a campaign is actually performing, and what to do next.
The metrics listed below are the key metrics I use when measuring campaign performance at a glance. These are broad strokes that will give an indication of how the campaign is performing, without getting lost in the weeds.
If you hire someone to run your Google Ads, these metrics will help to inform your decision making process and give nuance to any conversations regarding campaign performance.
There is also merit to letting them do their thing (please, let them do their thing!), but I’ve heard too many PPC horror stories that could have been avoided by a few basic checks and balances.
A Quick Note on Success
Just like in an actual business, the primary goal here should always be profitability. If you cannot achieve a baseline of profitability, all the other metrics are worthless.
If you run lead gen, that means cost-per-acquisition (CPA). If you run e-commerce, that means return-on-ad-spend (ROAS).
Impressions, clicks and conversions are certainly useful metrics, but they do not indicate good performance on their own.
The metrics listed below are performance indicators, best used to optimise campaigns over an extended period of time, and ideally by someone who knows what they are doing.
As always: set benchmarks, monitor campaign performance, iterate slowly and steadily.
1. Spend
Regularly monitor your campaign spend to understand how the budget is being allocated, identify opportunities to increase conversions and make the spend go further.
Monitoring campaign budgets can also help to identify trends across hours of the day, days of the week, months of the year and seasonal holidays. Set budgets accordingly.
The two main problems with campaign spend are overspending and underspending.
Problem 1: Overspending budget
If your budget is being spent by lunchtime, you are missing out on impressions, and potential sales, for the rest of the day.
The obvious fix here is to increase the budget, with the caveat that the campaign needs to be set up correctly and optimised. Google loves spending more budget, and in general, spending more will help to increase impression share (more on this later).
To see how much impression share is being lost to the budget, add the “Search lost IS (budget)” column at the campaign level.
Before increasing the budget:
- Check that your bidding strategy is appropriate to your advertising goals.
- Check that keyword selection is not too broad. Change keyword match types and remove irrelevant keywords to tighten up when your ads appear.
- Check that your ad copy is aligned with your value proposition to cut down on unnecessary clicks.
- Check keyword quality scores. The better the quality score, the cheaper your cost-per-click will be.
Any increase in budget should be monitored to make sure that conversions are scaling with the budget.
Problem 2: Underspending budget
Campaigns need traffic to accumulate data. Without a significant amount of conversion data, it will be difficult to optimise the campaign for maximum ROI.
If the budget is not being spent each day, your campaign focus is too narrow. For certain industries and niches that can be a good outcome, but for most businesses, you want to be utilising your budget to reach as many potential customers as possible.
To increase your spend:
- Expand your keyword selection. Get new keyword ideas from the search terms report, keyword planner, or simply look at the keyword suggestions at the bottom of the search results page.
- Review keyword match types. Broad match keywords can be very effective, as long as they are controlled with an extensive negative keyword list.
- Test a new bidding strategy, or check that your current bidding strategy isn’t throttling results.
- Increase your maximum bid.
- Increase the size of the area you are targeting. Google Ads work best at scale and if there are not enough people in your target area, you will struggle to spend budget.
If the campaign is new, you may need to accumulate conversion data by using manual bidding (or maximise clicks) before moving to an automated bidding strategy.
2. Impression Share
Google Ads is a live auction and it’s important to know how your campaigns are performing against competitors.
Head over to Auction Insights (Campaigns > Insights and reports > Auction insights) to see how often your ads are showing, ranked against competitors bidding on similar keywords.
The key metric here is impression share (IS).
Impression share = impressions / total eligible impressions.
In a niche market with few competitors, it may be possible to get a 50-70% impression share on a modest budget. In a highly competitive market, getting 30-50% impression share will put you in a strong position. Aiming for anything higher may be cost prohibitive.
If your impression share is low, you may need to increase your budget or improve your ad rank.
I’ve written an entire article on gaining competitive advantage that goes into impression share and ad rank in greater detail.
3. Click Through Rate (CTR)
On the surface, CTR shows the relevance of your keyword selection and ads. The user types in a search term, they see some ads and if the results align with their query, they click.
For example, if you had 10 clicks and 100 impressions, then your CTR would be 10%.
Dig a little deeper and CTR will reveal the effectiveness of your brand messaging, how people perceive your value proposition, and which products and services you should be focusing on to grow your online sales.
- If the CTR is low, you might be targeting the wrong keywords, or your ads are not relevant to the search query. Test new keywords, make sure the keywords are included in the ad copy (known as message matching).
- If your keywords and ads are aligned (with “good-excellent” ad strength), but CTR is still low, your products and services are not connecting with users. Try new messaging, add unique-selling-points (USPs) and test different call-to-actions (CTAs).
- If the CTR is high, but conversions are low, the landing page experience and value proposition needs improving.
Having a strong CTR is the first step in getting qualified people to your website, already primed to buy your products and services.
Expected CTR is also a key metric in ad rank and indicates to Google how relevant your ads are to users, and for Google, that is the most important indicator of all.
Do not underestimate the importance of CTR, and don’t stop optimising.
4. Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is a reliable indicator to check that all the different campaign elements are lined up and working together.
For example, if you had 50 conversions from 1,000 ad clicks, your conversion rate would be 5%. 50 ÷ 1,000 = 5%.
Starting within Google Ads, the conversion rate will show the % of conversions on the campaign, ad group, ad or keyword level. This information can be used to optimise the campaign with better targeting, keywords, images and copy etc.
However, it’s important to remember that the data point we are measuring – which is conversions – happens on the landing page. Once people click the ad, the landing page is responsible for getting them to take action.
If all the other metrics in your campaign are aligned and performing well (keyword selection, impressions, clicks, CTR etc), you most likely have a problem with your landing page experience. This could be any number of factors, such as message matching, value proposition, trust indicators or UX/UI.
To increase conversion rate, first make sure your keywords, ads and landing pages are aligned, then test different landing page elements such as copy, images, button placements, triggers and hooks, payment options, social proof, even down to colour schemes.
Even the slightest change can have a big impact on your conversion rate.
5. Cost per Conversion
Cost per conversion is a useful metric for showing the cost of sale at a more granular level.
While ROAS and CPA calculate return at the account level, Cost per conversion can be used to show the cost per conversion of individual campaigns, ad groups, ads and keywords.
If you are tracking specific conversion values, such as the price of a product or service, cost per conversion will show you how much it cost to sell each item, and help to calculate the profitability of each.
This data can then be used to scale different segments of your business, turn off unprofitable products and services, and show which areas of your account need optimising.
There are a lot of factors that feed into lowering the cost per conversion, and there isn’t a simple fix (this is basically the job of a PPC specialist).
While there are a lot of tweaks that can be made in Google Ads, the biggest wins often come from improving ad relevance, the landing page experience and the value proposition.
6. Search Terms Report
The search terms report (not actually a metric, but don’t let that scare you away) is a powerful tool to analyse the relevance of your keyword selection and find new keyword ideas.
You can find the search terms report under Campaigns > Insights and reports > Search terms.
Monitoring this report is essential if your campaigns are using broad match keywords. Once per month, go through the report and see which search terms have triggered your ad.
If any search terms show potential, add them as keywords. If the search terms convert, consider changing the match type to phrase or match, or increasing the maximum bid. You can also add the search term to your ad copy to improve ad relevance.
If irrelevant search terms are appearing, add them as negative keywords.
Use filters to sift through the data more efficiently. Filters allow you to add + / – values to all the usual metrics (impressions, clicks, CTR, conversions). Some useful, lesser-known filters include keyword text, added / excluded, match type and campaign type.
Final Thoughts
Keep out of the weeds, focus on what will make the biggest impact, and don’t neglect ad relevance, landing page experience and value proposition.