How Can You Monitor Your Results?
There are two main platforms to monitor the results of your Google Ads project.
Google Analytics
This is an easy and efficient way to track performance. If you link your Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts, you can easily track the performance of your ad campaigns on your Analytics dashboard. You can monitor the performance of your campaigns by selecting Acquisition > Google Ads in the Analytics menu. Analytics system also provides a secondary menu in which you can monitor the performance of keywords, search queries, hour of the day, display, video, or shopping campaigns. The advantage of Analytics platform over Google Ads is that Analytics provides additional value by reporting the performance of the visitors on your website.
With this tracking capability in Analytics, you can decide on the success of campaigns and perform tests to achieve the best conversion. By selecting Acquisition > All Traffic > Source / Medium, you can compare the performance of Google Ads campaigns to other channels.
Google Ads
In addition to Google Analytics, you can monitor the performance of your campaigns directly on Google Ads. After selecting Tools > Conversions from the menu, you may start tracking conversions. As the first step, Google Ads system will ask you to select the kind of conversions you want to track. You may track conversions on your website or app, track calls, or import data from another source.
You should enter a name for the conversion, determine a value to measure the impact, and select count. After creating your conversion action, Google Ads system will provide a global site tag and an event snippet. The global site tag adds visitors to your basic remarketing lists and sets new cookies on your domain. You must install this tag on every page of your website. The event snippet works with the global site tag to track actions that should be counted as conversions. You need to add these codes in the <head> section of your website codes.
Which KPI’s Should You Follow?
KPI is the abbreviation for Key Performance Indicator. KPI’s represent the metrics to measure performance. Using these metrics, you can compare your performance to previous periods, or you can monitor how your performance advances.
You may focus on the following KPI’s in your Google Ads project:
Impressions
Every time Google Ads system displays your ad, it is called an impression. As advertisers are eager to display their ads to their target audience, impression is a metric they monitor.
Impression is not generally as important as click through rate or conversion metric, but the ad’s performance flow starts with the impression. It is the starting point. If your aim is to reach as many people as possible and display your message or video to large audiences, it is a good idea to monitor this metric more closely.
Clicks / Click Through Rate
After an impression occurs and a user sees your ad, you should monitor if that user clicks on your ad or not. As click through rate symbolizes the interest of the user seeing the ad, higher click through rates are better.
As this metric directly affects the quality score of your ads, it helps your ads to perform better. Segmenting your target audience and communicating with each segment using tailored messages will help you to increase the click through rate. As they generate revenue from the clicks, sometimes the websites in the Google display network use special tactics to make the visitors click on the ads, even if they do not want to. In this kind of situation, you may observe high click-through rates, but you may also observe that this traffic is useless. You should be careful about this. I will elaborate on this in-display ads chapter. Impressions and click-through rate will result in clicks (visitors). Together, they will provide a more detailed picture than merely the number of Google Ads visitors.
Conversions / Conversion rate
This is usually the most important metric to measure the effectiveness of the whole project. What results do you get in the end? How profitable are Google Ads visitors?
When users click on your ad, they come to a page on your website. There, they should perform a conversion. Conversions are the clicks resulting in a transaction and they may be in the form of sales, reservations, appointments, lead forms, or phone calls. By placing Google Ads conversion code in your website codes, you can monitor your performance directly on Google Ads dashboard. You should link your Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts to monitor your performance on Analytics dashboard. You can monitor the website performance metrics of the users who click on your ads, ecommerce performance of these people, or other conversion metrics. As the design and the functionality of your landing pages significantly affect the conversion rate, you should also focus on your website usability and website performance in general. When you divide your cost by conversions, you have cost per conversion metric. How much money are you spending to get one conversion? What is the value of this conversion?
The answers to these questions are important to decide on the fate of your campaigns.
User Performance: Bounce Rate, Pages/Session, Average Session Duration
Although they are usually not as important as conversions, you may monitor user performance metrics to have a better idea about the performance of your campaigns. If the users click on your ads, come to your website, do not like what they see, you will observe high bounce rates. As this signals an inefficient structure, it is important to monitor the campaigns having high bounce rates and work on them to improve this metric. Pages per session indicate how many pages users visit during a session. Session duration measures the length of a visit. You may monitor these figures on Analytics dashboard.
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