Top 5 Google AdWords Metrics to Monitor Each Day with Your Breakfast

KPI’s - Key Performance Indicators - in other words the things we measure to justify our jobs. But how do you go about deciding which ones to focus on? A quick online search brings up a rash of them in your results. And let’s face it, if you tried to track them all you’d never have time to do your actual job.

Monitoring results should be part of your daily routine - not all of it. At Driftrock, we like to keep things simple. Rather than waste hours in Excel wading through data, here’s our top 5 Google AdWords metrics to monitor each day with your breakfast:

1. Cost per conversion

This is basically the calculation for how much it costs to achieve an action you care about. e.g acquiring a new customer or a new registration.

Cost per conversion = Total spend
Total actions

It’s crucial to the success of any marketing campaign. Obviously the difference between your Revenue Per Conversion and Cost Per Conversion is profit! Lowering your cost per conversion opens doors and gives you options as a marketer:

A lower cost per conversion means you can push more volume. 
If you choose not to push volume, then a fall in your Cost Per Conversion will mean your campaign becomes more profitable.

Remember that it’s affected by multiple parts of your conversion funnel:

The price you pay for a click (and therefore all the things that affect the price) 
The landing page conversion rate.

Understanding your Cost Per Conversion makes you think beyond the bounds of AdWords. You should be as concerned your landing pages and commercials as your AdWords optimisation.

2. CTR - Click Through Ratio

In the majority of cases the CTR has the biggest effect on AdWords campaigns. A high CTR, leads to higher quality score which in turn, reduces your CPC and increases volume.

When optimizing AdWords for CTR try: 
Adding ad copy variations. 
Adding sitelinks. 
Adding review extensions. 
Adding other ad extensions. 
Making sure that keyword targets tightly match all the ads in the adgroup for bold highlighted text.

Your CTR is also an indicator of competition in the ad space. If the CTR changes dramatically it could mean you have a new competitor or a key competitor just left the ad space.

3. QS - Quality Score

A nudge from Google - pay heed!

Your quality score is important for the AdWords algorithm but it’s also Google’s way of telling you what you need to do to make things better. As you improve your quality score wonderful things happen! 
CPC’s drop
Average positions increase. 
It’s likely your landing page is more relevant so conversion may increase.

Don’t worry too much about quality score diagnostics when new keywords go live, it takes time for them to settle down and they may need reviewing first. However, if it’s bad after a few weeks, then you need to make some changes fast. You can find your QS here for each keyword:

Alternatively you can monitor average quality scores across accounts, campaigns, adgroups on Driftrock Marketing Overview.

4. CPC - Cost Per Click

CPC is a variable in the Google’s Adwords algorithm. Staying on top of CPC daily helps you keep an eye on the health of the account.

Increases and decreases have significant consequences on your Cost Per Conversion. Here are some of the things it may indicate:

Changes in level of competition. 
Improvements in CTR. 
Improvements in landing page quality score. 
Improvements in ad relevance. 
Changes in bid prices across the ad space. 
Seasonality also drastically affects CPC. The adspace is fluid across the year.

5. CR - Conversion Rate

Looking beyond Adwords.

It’s easy to forget that marketing goes beyond AdWords. Sometimes taking time to look at where conversion rate improvements can be made on landing pages have a bigger impact than trawling through AdWords. Every percentage increase in conversion dramatically reduces your Cost Per Conversion enabling you to bid higher, increase profits or drive more volume.

One of the best ways to improve your CR is to learn the basics of landing page optimisation and make sure your keyword targets are on the page. Your user should always know they have arrived at a relevant page for their search