Targeted advertising on search engines, known as search engine advertising (SEA), is becoming increasingly important. However, the measurement of success for SEA must also be carried out in order to evaluate the various campaigns and their efficiency. We will show you which KPIs are particularly important and why measuring these KPIs can be crucial. After all, the effort should be worthwhile and profitable for your company!
Measuring the success of SEA using KPIs - understanding and interpreting
Knowing the pure numerical values and KPIs is useful, but not particularly effective. This is because the individual values and KPIs are related to each other, so you have to interpret them accordingly. However, the interpretation depends not least on the desired goals. For this reason, many companies find it difficult to use KPIs to measure the success of SEA.
Various key performance indicators for measuring success
Many different metrics can be used to measure success for SEA. Each KPI has a specific meaning and purpose. Just because one of these KPIs is not suitable for your company does not mean that other companies will not still benefit from it. For this reason, it is important that you know the most important KPIs for measuring success for SEA in any case.
The impressions
The impressions are an important figure for measuring the success of SEA, but are only of limited significance. This is because impressions only show how often an ad was displayed by you in the search engine. For this reason, although the impression values are important, they cannot be used meaningfully without other KPIs.
The conversions
The conversions show how often the desired actions were carried out by the user after clicking on the ad. Be it the subscription to the newsletter or the purchase of a specific product. However, conversions are absolute figures that you must always put into relation so that you can use the value to measure success for SEA.
The clicks
The clicks show how often a direct impression is followed by a click on the ad. Each of these clicks sends the visitor directly from the ad to your website. This is important in principle, but can also be misleading. Because a single visitor can click on the ad several times. This means that you do not pay for the individual visitor, but for the click. You can therefore see very clearly how your budget for SEA is being used.
The click-through rate (CTR)
The click-through rate is far more important for measuring success in SEA, as you are looking at the ratio of impressions to clicks. This means that you can use this KPI to see what percentage of users not only see an ad, but also click on it.
For this reason, the CTR plays a very special role in measuring the success of SEA.
The click-through rate shows how trustworthy you appear to your customers and what value your brand can demonstrate.
The higher the click-through rate, the higher the relevance of your ads for users.
(Image: theonlineadvertisingguide.com/)The conversion rate (CVR)
The conversion rate can be used to determine how many clicks on an ad lead directly to a conversion. This key figure is calculated by dividing the number of conversions by the number of clicks.
Basically, this key figure can be summarized as follows. The higher the CVR, the more efficiently the budget is used. The key figure CVR is closely linked to the KPI for cost control, CPC. You can use conversion tracking tools to further refine the key figures determined and thus further optimize the possibilities of your campaigns.KPIs for cost control (CPC, CPL, CPA, CPO)
A whole range of KPIs are primarily used for cost control and cost management. These should not be neglected either, as they are used in many companies to adhere to the budget. However, these key figures can only be used to measure and evaluate actions that are linked to specific remuneration.
First of all, these are the key figures that convey cost per conversion. These are CPL with cost-per-lead, CPA with cost-per-acquisition and CPO with cost-per-order.
On the other hand, there is the key figure CPC, which means cost-per-click and shows you the real costs that you incur when someone clicks on your ad.
These are all important key figures, but they can only be used effectively on their own in certain environments. As a rule, these KPIs are primarily used to control costs and can be used to assess the efficiency of marketing activities with regard to the budget.
Traditional key performance indicators in comparison
In addition to the typical SEA KPIs mentioned above, which are regularly used to measure the success of SEA measures, you should also not ignore the traditional KPIs.
These include the return on investment (ROI), but also the cost-turnover ratio (CUR). Both can be important values that not only show the efficiency of search engine marketing, but also the value of the marketing measures in relation to the other company figures. Because these should also not be ignored when comparing success.
Continuous monitoring of the success of your SEA campaigns
As you can see, there is a whole range of key performance indicators that you can use to measure the success of SEA measures. Of course, not all of these KPIs are equally important or equally important. It depends, among other things, on your company, the marketing objectives and the company's position on the market as to which KPIs you rate particularly highly. There can be huge differences here from company to company.
However, if you have decided on fixed KPIs that you want to track and monitor, you should stick to them. This is the only way you can define both short-term and long-term trends and results and monitor and control them at all times. The better the tracking and the more closely meshed the controls, the sooner you can avoid bad investments or stop or revise poorly performing campaigns. Monitoring the KPIs therefore not only serves to measure the success of SEA, but also to optimize the various measures.
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