Are You Wasting Your Ad Spend? Essential PPC Metrics for Small Businesses
Tracking the results of your digital marketing efforts is very important, especially for small businesses where every dollar counts. Learn essential PPC metrics for small businesses to ensure effective ad spend and ROI.
Tracking the results of your digital marketing efforts is very important. It helps you
understand what works and what doesn’t. This is especially true for small businesses,
where every dollar counts. Unlike big companies that have entire teams dedicated to
tracking and analytics, small businesses face more challenges.
With the new focus on privacy, tracking has become even harder. Starting from the top and moving to the bottom line, here’s how you can track the results of your PPC campaigns to know that your PPC management is effective.
Impressions & Clicks
Impressions are the number of times your ad or link is shown. This helps you understand
how many people see your content. Clicks are the number of times people click on your
ad or link. This shows how many people are interested enough to visit your website.
Limitations:
Impressions and clicks have little correlation with your business’s bottom line. It does
not help you estimate your return-on-investment, or judge if the ads are working.
Conversions
Conversions can be set up on your PPC campaigns which indicate that the user
performed a desired action. For small businesses, typical conversions of Contact Form
Completions and Phone Calls. For e-commerce, you’re typically tracking sales.
Limitations:
Not all conversions are the same. Just because a user fills out a contact form doesn’t
mean they are a qualified leads or will become a paying customer.
Conversion Value
Conversion value assigns a monetary value to each conversion. This helps you
understand the financial impact of your PPC campaigns. For example, if a sale is worth
$100, then each conversion can be tracked to see how much revenue it generates.
Most PPC platforms such as Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising will allow you to
upload the conversion value after the fact through protocols such as Offline
Conversions. Using a CRM like Hubspot will allow you to follow the contact from
conversion to sale, and send it back to the platform for further optimizations and
analysis.
Limitations:
Calculating and sending the Conversion Values back to the platform may require
additional development and business processes. When set up correctly though, this
method proves superior in tracking and evaluating results of pay-per-click (PPC)
advertising campaigns.