In this series of posts we have looked at a number of the different facets involved in setting up and maintaining your Google AdWords campaign. From keywords to the actual ad text we have explored tips and information detailing what they are and how they work. In this blog post we will look at the other end of the process: Just how do you evaluate the progress of your campaign?
Once you have set up your Google AdWords campaign and spent all the necessary time looking at the products on your site that you wish to promote. Then found key phrases that will perform and are relevant to your needs. And finally taken care to write ad text, and have actually had the campaign running for a period of time. You will soon be looking for some indication of whether your campaign is working effectively. After all, if you can optimise your campaign then you can, not only spend your advertising budget in a more effective way, but you can actually make more sales.
One of the initial components to look at is Impressions. This represents the actual number of times that your ad has been shown. If you find that your ads do not have many Impressions, then this could be for a number of reasons – the keywords that trigger your ads may not be popular, meaning your ads are only being shown to a very small number of people.
Clicks are hopefully the results of Impressions, these represent people seeing your advert and deciding to click on it.
Click through rate, or CTR, is a combination of the two previous factors. CTR is the number of Clicks compared to the number of Impressions represented as a percentage. The higher the CTR the better your ad is performing.
Conversions represent the final goal of most sites: a sale. Although high numbers of Clicks and good CTR’s are desirable, they must all make way for the ultimately essential Conversions.
It may seem like most of the work on your AdWords campaign is over when you have all your keywords and ads in place. But the most effective way to run pay-per-click advertising is by constant revision based on previous results. By analysing statistics such as these you can evaluate how your Google AdWords campaign is performing.
Martin Able is an online advertising authority working with payment gateways and money transfer services for ecommerce stores.
We initially looked at Google AdWords last month. It is a popular way for businesses to attract targeted traffic to their site by placing adverts alongside Google’s search results or even across Google’s content network. Many companies find this to be an effective way of advertising as they find their adverts are only shown to the people using certain keywords in their search terms. This means that (as long as the AdWords campaign is well administered) only the right people are shown the ad and only the right sort of people will click on it.