Pay-per-click (PPC), also known as Search Engine Marketing (SEM), advertising is a form of digital marketing that has become popular over the last few years for driving traffic to websites from startups to Fortune 500 companies. In 2019, it was estimated that over one billion searches were conducted on Google every day. 

While a company is not trying to target every single searcher who types a question into Google’s search engine, Denver search engine marketing strategies help searchers find answers to their search queries more efficiently and faster; on the other hand, 50 percent of searchers who find your website through PPC are more likely to finish the sales funnel than their organic searcher counterparts. 

Not only should these PPC ads be monitored and optimized, but conversions should be tracked and an ROI should be produced based on the ad running. If you're using PPC for your business, it's vital to track its performance to know how successful your campaigns are. You can use KPIs (key performance indicators) as a metric of how well your PPC ads are working. 

The first thing you need to do is set these KPIs! Not sure which ones are the best? It all depends on your company’s overall goals with PPC ads, but here are three components our Denver search engine marketing experts will analyze. 

1. Quality score

This is a check developed by Google that tells a marketer how relevant the content in their PPC ad is, using metrics like landing page experience and click-through rate (CTR). 

This is an important metric that does not necessarily need to be tracked, but should be optimized before the ad even goes live! 

This will allow for a company to have the best chance of landing a higher ad spot in SERP for the best CPC and ROI in mind. A landing page needs to be optimized, user friendly and provide relevant content to the overall PPC ads. If the content and optimization seem a bit off, more than likely, Google will run the ad but it will not be in the top fold of SERP. 

Therefore, it's vital to improve your quality score to pay less for each click.

2. Clicks & Cost-Per-Clicks (CPC) 

Clicks are probably one of the most significant metrics to track during  PPC ads, well because the name itself has ‘clicks’ inside of it. Clicks are a significant part of PPC ads since they determine how many people view your advertisements in a given period, and  in return, means how much money the company pays once the advertisement is over. 

Every industry’s CPC will be different and at the same time what keywords are used will also increase or decrease the overall Cost-Per-Click (CPC). 

If there are major spikes or decreases in the number of clicks on the campaign, it is important to review these changes. This could be due to a number of factors, but do not let a PPC ad campaign just sit! Remember: each click is costing your company money! Make it worth it! 

Neil Patel states that a company that lets their ads run for one month before reviewing the results. How does this correlate to clicks? An increase in clicks means that the competition’s ads have stopped running, you moved up in an ad spot or this is the time to capitalize on a new opportunity to spend a bit more money, but get even better results. 

A simple click of a PPC ad is the beginning stage of the campaign’s overall goal- whether it be brand awareness or the beginning of the sales funnel- it is important but not the sole factor because some clicks are accidents which help future ads, but do not help the KPIs that are set in place. 

At the same time, if some ads are not getting as many clicks as was originally hoped for, a company can pause them and only focus on the ones that are performing well.

3. Conversion rate

Who is actually converting? Your conversion rate is the percentage of site visitors that take a specified action on your website. You can measure it by dividing the number of conversions by the number of total clicks on your PPC ad. 

4. Hire us! 

Are you tired of spending more money on ads and not seeing results? Our Denver search engine marketing experts at Denver Media Groups specialize in PPC ads along with a number of other SEO/ SEM strategies. For more help, give us a call today!