What are the most important Google Ads metrics for campaign optimization? This is the first question you will encounter when getting acquainted with Google Ads advertising, and in the rest of this blog you will get the right guidance about this topic.
First of all, it is important to distinguish different goals of Google ads campaigns. Different metrics are important depending on whether we want to achieve as many online sales as possible with a certain campaign, improve brand awareness or get new traffic to the website.
Sales campaigns
Many webshops use Google advertising to improve their online sales. One of the ways to achieve this goal is by using campaigns that are optimized towards achieving as many sales as possible. The most important metrics for these campaigns are Conversion rate and Cost per conversion.
Conversion rate gives us information about the percentage of acquired users who made a conversion, in this case, that is an online purchase. It is very important for every advertiser that the acquired visitors are of high quality in the sense that they complete a purchase in one of their visits to the webshop.
In addition, it is important to pay attention to the average cost of conversion. A large number of conversions with a high average cost price will probably not mean a good result, and for this reason it is very important to keep the average cost price of a conversion as low as possible.
Brand awareness and reach campaigns
In addition to sales campaigns, many companies and brands use Google advertising to increase brand awareness, and to get the highest possible reach of new campaigns or new communications and messages. Although at first glance the optimization of these campaigns seems simple, there are several metrics that can be improved to further improve the campaigns.
First of all, for campaigns with this goal, the number of impressions and clicks is very important, and by paying attention to fraud and idle clicks, advertisers can lower the average cost per click and the average cost per thousand impressions. In other words, the lower the two listed metrics, the more impressions and clicks you will get for the same budget. In addition, by excluding unwanted placements from your campaigns, you will likely improve your CTR, while acquiring better quality visitors.
Currently, the most common forms of brand awareness and reach campaigns are Google Ads Display and Google Ads Video campaigns. If you want to learn more about how to create an eye-catching video campaign, click here and read the latest Google guidelines for creating high-quality video ads.
Traffic campaigns
In some cases, Google advertisers create campaigns with the aim of increasing the number of visits to a certain website. With these campaigns, everything is immediately clear - the more clicks, the better.
If an increase in the number of visits to a website is to be achieved with Display or Video campaigns, the metrics of average cost per click and thousand impressions are important. But, for campaigns with this goal, it is very important that the CTR is as high as possible. CTR shows us the relationship between the number of impressions and the number of recorded clicks, and a higher number of clicks means a higher number of visitors, which is the ultimate goal.
In addition to the above stated, if Search campaigns are used, a very important metric is Top of page rate. This metric shows the percentage of an active Search ad showing in the top 4 results after performing a Google search. You may be wondering why Top of page rate is more important than Impression share in this case? The answer is that the top 4 positions achieve a significantly better CTR compared to other positions that ads can occupy.
Enough to start Google advertising and have good optimization?
By paying attention to the aforementioned metrics, advertisers can improve their Google Ads campaigns. However, Google advertising is much more demanding and complex, so it is very important to take into account other metrics in addition to Google's feedback when optimizing campaigns.
In our blog about the necessary tools to get started with Google advertising, you can find out what other tools are available to advertisers to improve the performance of campaigns and overall digital advertising. If you still want to leave your digital advertising to us, contact us with a few simple clicks.