How Are My Campaigns Progressing?: Tips on How to Measure Activity

I have been extremely busy lately, I maintain a full work load here at 7Search, as well as continuing my education about the Search Engine Marketing industry as a whole. It’s a lot of work, but I enjoy learning and surprising myself by what I’m able to accomplish. I have been exploring the platform in order to familiarize myself and decide the best ways to work with this massive amount of data. Since I have very little time to waste between all of my projects, I have to find the variables in my reports that I can at a glance determine the progress of my campaigns.

I’ve been learning a lot, so let me share with you so you can grow, too.

It all depends on the goals. The best ways to determine how you are progressing is by defining very clearly what your online campaign is trying to accomplish. If you are running an e-commerce site, then reaching goals and creating conversions may be your focus. Your campaign could also be focused on lead generation, provoking your audience to sign a form, subscribe to a newsletter or pick up the phone.

Some ways to determine the progress of campaigns with these types of goals is to compare your amount of clicks to the amount of conversions you’ve created. If you are receiving conversions with a low amount of clicks, this could indicate that your keywords are extremely well targeted, the offer or niche is attractive and your site is designed efficiently. If you are receiving a low amount of conversions and receiving a large amount of clicks, this could indicate that your keywords are not targeted enough, or that your ad copy and site are not attractive to an audience.

You can do this by creating a chart covering a certain amount of time (week, month, quarter, etc.), and compare the click amounts with your conversion rate. You can then plug in your data depending on the date to compare and contrast your activity. For a lead generation site, this is harder to track as a conversion doesn’t occur on the site. You would need to track your business results and track back to where your leads came from (online, on the phone). Benchmarks could be put into place to help you track, such as (x) amount of leads on the phone, or (x) of emails collected into your database.

Use metrics to mark your progress. Google Analytics offers data on seemingly every factor that is at work in pay per click. They act like clues, helping you piece together a picture of the activity of your account. A metric that you could use to examine is your amount of spend. Let’s say that your product costs $300. You’ve spent $400 in clicks to market it. You are then operating at a loss. This is helpful because then you can determine where you are bleeding and what needs to be adjusted. Are your keywords bid higher than necessary? Are they targeted enough? How about the keyword match?

Another metric to look at is your bounce rate or pages per visit rate. Bounce rate indicates the amount of time that visitors spend on your site. If your site is relevant and high quality, visitors should spend a decent amount of time going from page to page. This translates into a low bounce rate. However, If you have a high bounce rate (above 50%), then you have to ask yourself what issues may be at work. It could be the factors I mentioned above or possibly click fraud. Tweak your campaign to lower that bounce rate and make your site more relevant.

The pages per visit rate shows how many pages were clicked through with each visit. This indicates that the visitor found the content compelling and worthy of exploration. If your visitors are clicking through several pages, they are possibly interested in making a converting action. This metric is affected by the size and scope of your site, but is still a valuable indicator of site activity.

Pay per click at large can be a daunting behemoth, but you don’t have to be intimidated. The trick is to get what you need for your operation, profitability. Stick to the metrics that directly affect your progress. Start out small and gain a foothold into the workings. After that, you can start to play with the data in different segments in order to “drill down” into the information.

As I progress, I’ll be sharing more ideas with you. Stick around!