According to statistics, 91% of businesses worldwide use social media in their marketing strategies. It’s no secret that most of them also have active PPC campaigns to achieve their set objectives.
What are PPC campaigns? Pay-per-click, as the name suggests, is when businesses pay a particular online platform for the clicks they receive on their ads. These can be Google ads, ads in the Meta suite, or on other social media channels like TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
But how do we monitor and interpret these PPC campaigns? Yes, we know, it’s simple nowadays: with AI. However, before analyzing performance through AI tools, you need to know what you want to track to determine if you’re close to reaching your goal.
Whether you’re a marketing specialist at the beginning of your journey, an entrepreneur working with an agency, or even managing campaigns on your own, this article will be useful.
KPIs for Acquisition Objectives
The eCommerce market has grown significantly in recent years, so many businesses (including those we work with) are online stores.
The primary goal of an online store, regardless of its niche, is to sell. Here’s what you should track in each case for eCommerce.
- Number of purchases and cost per acquisition, which is the amount you’ve paid to secure a transaction.
- ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) is an index that shows the revenue generated compared to the budget spent.
- Conversion rate: The percentage of users who saw the ad and made a purchase. A high conversion rate indicates a well-targeted campaign and an effective advertising message.
- CPC (Cost per Click): This is a relevant KPI, especially in Google Search campaigns where the traffic volume is high.
- CTR (Click-Through Rate): The percentage of clicks obtained relative to the number of ad impressions. Generally, this KPI shows how attractive your campaigns are.
KPIs for Lead Generation
- Number of leads and cost per lead: In general, businesses offering services track form completions or calls as leads. Other conversions that can be tracked in this case include clicks on email addresses, phone numbers, or subscriptions.
- Conversion rate: This measures the percentage of people who complete the lead form after clicking on the ad.
- Quality Score: A KPI found in Google that shows how relevant ads and landing pages are for users searching for the services offered.
- Lead Qualification Rate: A specific LinkedIn indicator that measures the percentage of leads qualified as real business opportunities, based on their quality according to predefined criteria.
KPIs for Traffic & Brand Awareness
- Number of sessions (if tracked in GA4) or landing page views (if tracked from Meta), i.e., the total number of visits made by users to your site.
- Clicks and cost per click (CPC): Here, you can track clicks on links leading to the site or all clicks (including clicks on the ad image, “See more,” etc.). Of course, the most useful is the click per link.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR)
- Video Views: For traffic campaigns on TikTok, the number of video views is a relevant KPI to measure reach.
- Reach & impressions: The number of users reached by your ads and the number of times they were displayed. Note: An ad can be shown multiple times to the same user, so this KPI will always be higher than reach.
- Cost per mille (CPM): The cost you pay for every 1,000 ad impressions. This indicator is helpful when you want your ads to be shown to as many people as possible.
- Engagement rate: The percentage of likes, shares, comments, and views obtained on an ad relative to the number of users who saw it.
Which Tools Should You Use for Reports?
- Google Analytics: The best platform for reporting and analyzing data from all sources. Here you can see results from PPC campaigns as well as from direct or organic sources. We recommend using it as your main reporting tool because it is comprehensive, intuitive, and provides real data.
- Meta Insights: Reports from Meta are more useful when tracking reach, engagement, or leads from Facebook. If you have an eCommerce site, we advise you to double-check in Analytics because Facebook has a different attribution method, and you might see more conversions than you actually had.
- Google Ads
- Swydo & HubSpot: Two useful tools when you want your reports to have a clean design, be easy to follow, and auto-generate at a certain time.
- SEMrush: A useful tool if you want to include SEO reports alongside PPC reports.
- Custom reports and applications: If you’ve worked with existing tools and feel you need something more customized, it might be a good idea to invest in an AI tool specifically built for your business.
What Should You Know About PPC Campaign Results?
In the case of eCommerce, it’s essential to know that reports can show you two types of conversions: direct conversions and assisted conversions. What’s the difference between them?
- Direct conversions (last click): These occur when the channel the user last interacted with led to a purchase.
- Assisted conversions: These show a path where a specific channel contributed to the purchase but wasn’t the last platform the customer interacted with. For example, the user saw an ad on Facebook for a clothing brand but accessed the site to purchase three days later from a Google ad.
For an online store, it’s not enough to just track the number of purchases. You might have a satisfactory number of purchases, but when you tally it up, you may not reach your desired goal. Why? Because the campaign budget and the cost of acquisition come into play. Therefore, it’s advisable to optimize campaigns to achieve a good cost with a balanced ROAS.
When it comes to leads, here the reports analyzed from platforms should always be compared with a “real-world” status. If purchases can be seen as numbers on the site and you’re sure that order took place, a completed form or a call doesn’t necessarily mean a converted client.
How to Combine AI-Driven Result Interpretation with a Specialist?
Although ad platforms and tools are intuitive and report exactly what you’re interested in seeing, this is often not enough to make a business decision.
This is where the marketing specialist comes in, who takes all the data, analyzes it, and interprets it so that it can be used for scaling. Beyond data interpretation, a specialist has the ability to understand a business’s needs (and yours as an entrepreneur) and find the right solutions.
AI might be very advanced, but even a business needs its own “therapist” when it comes to digital marketing.