Metrics and tracking modules are abundant; however, companies’ search engine marketing efforts are still a challenging concept to grasp for many business owners. You may have a marketing specialist on staff, but when it comes to online marketing, you as a business owner should understand as much as you can to help your company’s online success.
Measuring the impact and effectiveness of your online ad campaigns is key to optimizing and maximizing your return on investment. We’re going to discuss the ways to gauge the performance of your ads.
Baseline Data
Establishing baseline data is essential for any marketing process. Baseline data is information that’s helpful for future reference when you start advertising. When it comes to online advertising, here are the useful baseline data to include before starting your ad campaign:
- Website Traffic – it’s important to know how many regular visits you have on your site on a daily, weekly, monthly, and even yearly basis.
- Sales – make sure to know the sales figures for a specific product or service you will be advertising for.
- Social Media and Email Subscribers – know the number of social media followers and email subscribers you have.
Once you have gathered all of this information, it will be easier to measure the effectiveness of your ads.
Measurements
Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
CTR is an important metric. To get the CTR, divide the total number of people who saw your ad, also known as impressions, by the number that clicked on the ad. If you get a lot of impressions with a low CTR, that means a lot of people see your ad, but they are not clicking on it. On the other hand, if you have a high CTR along with a high number of impressions, then that means your ad is grabbing the readers’ attention, and they are clicking it. However, a high CTR doesn’t always mean you’re attracting your targeted customers. To know more about CTR, we will delve deeper into it in future posts.
Who Are Your Visitors and Where Are They Coming From
Analytics tools can show you how many people are visiting your site for the first time and how many have been to it before. This metric is called sessions. Ideally, there should be a good balance of new sessions and old ones. If the new sessions are decreasing, it may mean that your ads are not working. If there is a decline in repeat visits, it can also say that there’s something wrong with your site’s marketing or functionality.
Customers are never in one place. This, it makes sense for companies’ search engine ads be set up across different online platforms. When you track where website visitors come from, you can tell which of your campaigns are creating more interest. This is good for specifying which strategies are working and which ones are not. It will also show you which advertising platform your target market uses most.
Watch Your Quality Score
Essentially, the better the quality score of your ad is, the higher up it will rank in search engines. While we don’t know precisely how search engines determine an ad’s quality score, as long as we follow their standards and guidelines when it comes to it, then it will help in obtaining a good score.
A low score will penalize you with a higher cost per click and lesser impressions, both negatively affecting your ROI. There are a number of rules you can follow to get a good score: use relevant ad keywords, test out different ads, and update your negative keywords list that are bringing you the wrong customers.
Checking Your ROI
It can be extremely challenging to measure the revenue of companies’ search engine ad campaigns. This is because online ads don’t always immediately lead to a sale. Even though people click your ad and visit your site, they may just browse through it and leave without making a purchase. This behavior doesn’t always mean the ad was unsuccessful; sometimes people will read through your website, and they will have a better idea of your products and services, prompting a sale later.