Understanding Your PPC Metrics - Part Two

Back in February, I wrote a post that was an attempt to dispel some of the myths surrounding paid search in terms of performance metrics. It was only after a chance meeting this week I realised that part two was sadly missing.

To recap on part one, I highlighted that although all the metrics had their part to play they were not an adequate measure of success. Going back to the beginning, to measure true success you need to go back to the original objective of the campaign. These can generally be broken into three categories:

Create Brand Awareness

Perhaps the simplest of all objectives, but also the one that is most ambiguous, is creating brand awareness and driving traffic for the purpose of branding.

Achieving high traffic volumes is easy, but you cannot measure the success of a campaign based solely on visitor numbers as this does not measure the value of the campaign. To do this, measure visits against search terms generating traffic to ensure phrases are on-brand.

Couple this with site interaction (time on site, page visits etc.) and tools which measure how people are interacting/talking about your brand on social media sites such as http://socialmention.com/.

Generate leads

The most common type of conversion on non-ecommerce sites is measuring the number of completed actions the campaign has generated compared to the amount spent.


Whether your campaign objective is to drive traffic to download brochures or a free tool, pick up the telephone or complete a contact form, all can be measured using formulae and are effective ways of measuring the succes of a paid campaign, also allowing you to monitor whether marketing budgets are being met.

As long as your site is set up to record these actions the campaign can be tracked either directly, through the Adwords conversion tracking code, or via Analytics.

Generate sales

There are many ways to measure the success or failure of an ecommerce site including working out net or gross profit which, with the right calculations and profit margins, can be calculated right down to campaign, ad group and keyword level.

However, measuring your PPC campaign on ROI is regarded as the most common way and, similarly to the above format, it can be worked out at all levels of the campaign, enabling you to really focus down into the nitty gritty of the account and weed out any non-performing keywords or ad groups. To calculate ROI simply divide the revenue by the cost.


In a nutshell, the overall objective of the campaign is: 'What will define the metrics used in your PPC reports'. However it’s all the smaller metrics such as CTR, CPC, positions etc. that will help you achieve your ultimate goal, whether that is generating sales, leads or visits.

It’s also important to remember that it is more important to focus on the bigger picture, such as driving sales within a particular ROI, rather than worrying about your CTR (click through rate). It's also worth remembering that achieving the required ROI may actually require a lower position, which generally does not have as high a CTR as position one.