Top PPC KPIs You Should Be Tracking to Take Your Business Forward

It’s a competitive online world out there, and standing out, beating the competition, and winning customers over to your side can often seem like an insurmountable task. And for many businesses that don’t innovate, invest in digital marketing, or optimize their processes, it really is. If you want to make the younger generations love your brand, like the Gen Z buyers, you need to invest in inbound marketing, branding, and omnichannel experiences.

But that’s just the start. To start dominating in the online world, you need to invest in content marketing and complement your content strategy with meticulously-optimized PPC campaigns. Paid ads are the key to better online visibility, recognition, and brand awareness, and ultimately they will lead to faster sales and more customers returning to your online store. 

But, PPC is an intricate game, and it’s important to monitor the right KPIs (key performance indicators) in order to maximize your investment and achieve better results. Here are the KPIs you should be tracking. 

Sales lift as a fundamental KPI

How are your sales faring in the competitive online world? Are they going up or down, what’s the frequency and intensity of these changes, are you successfully forecasting sales trends and preparing for market fluctuations? These are just some of the questions that your strategists, analysts, and sales experts need to answer in order to create a robust sales model that your company can rely on. 

When it comes to PPC, though, the data you pull from your campaigns will give you invaluable information that will help you optimize your online efforts for maximum sales lift. In Ecommerce, for example, it’s easy to measure your sales lift because you have a direct way to monitor where each customer came from and how much they spent. You can monitor the sales, compare the results with your PPC efforts, and conclude whether or not your ads are doing their job.

Monitoring revenue fluctuations

The goal of almost every PPC campaign out there is to increase revenue in the short, mid, and long term. Some exceptions exist, though, where business leaders want to achieve other goals with their ads, such as raising awareness, better branding and communication with customers, or to become a primary source of information for online audiences. For the most part, though, you’re doing this to make more money.

With that in mind, one of the basics of good Ecommerce is to monitor your revenue fluctuations, especially through your PPC channels and campaigns. You can apply this in any industry, of course, but the key is to track your revenue and extract valuable revenue data from your PPC campaigns in order to optimize them for better performance. 

If the revenue from PPC is not meeting your projected total, then you need to go back to the drawing board and start re-optimizing your ads.

Monitor cost-per-acquisition for each campaign

Acquiring customers costs money, and PPC works by you paying each time someone clicks on one of your ads. Naturally, if people click on your ads and you have to pay every time they do, you want to make sure that that click is going to ultimately lead to a sale. This is where many businesses start losing money, and in highly-competitive markets like Australia, for example, CPA optimization has become a top priority.

Dominating Sydney’s online market can be a very difficult task, and companies can lose a lot of money on PPC if they don’t work with an experienced AdWords agency in Sydney that focuses on lowering the cost of acquisition by optimizing ad campaigns for maximum conversions. Whatever the market you’re operating in, you have to monitor your cost per acquisition, work with a professional team of marketers, and maximize the potential of each click to turn into a sale.

Tracking funnel engagement and performance

Sometimes, you will run ad campaigns to achieve different goals along with your sales objectives, and when that happens, you want to be able to monitor different important KPIs. You can use your ad campaigns and the data you pull to monitor the campaign’s impact on your brand and its position in the market, monitor their impact on the customer’s shopping experience, or even monitor the micro-conversions on your site.

All the online platforms you use to run, manage, and optimize your ads give you deep and meaningful insights that you can use to achieve various goals, not just increase sales. You can monitor funnel engagement and audience performance to see how people are interacting with your brand and what actions they’re taking to make a purchase or if they are coming back.

PPC quality-of-life KPIs you should track

Last but not least, make sure to track those quality-of-life KPIs like:

• Your click-through rate
• Your conversion rate, on-site engagement
• Your quality score on AdWords
• And your impression share

Each of these will give you an insight into how your ads are performing in the saturated online world, and what you need to do to minimize costs while improving conversions. These are supplementary KPIs that will feed into the bigger KPIs above, so don’t neglect them when you’re optimizing your PPC campaigns. 

Over to you

PPC is a vital part of any strong digital marketing strategy, but you have to do it right or risk losing money with every campaign you launch. Be sure to keep a close eye on these KPIs in order to take your business forward in the online world and minimize financial waste along the way.