In online marketing, it is not only important that you are successful with your campaigns, ideas, posts and pages, but above all how you achieve success. Only if you understand your key performance indicators and can read them correctly will you have a chance of working really efficiently.
Google Ads offers you a range of tools with which you can read in great detail which measures have an impact on your site. If you understand these key figures better, you can optimize more easily and find weak points in your campaigns. In this overview, we show you what the key figures mean for you and what is particularly important.
Google Ads and the most important key figures at a glance
Clicks
Of course, nothing works without the click count. The number of clicks is still an important indicator that your ads are working. After all, visits to your site are the first step towards customer acquisition.
Click-through rate
The CTR (click-through rate) shows the relationship between displayed ads and clicks. In other words, how many users see your ad and click through to your page. A low CTR on your ad may mean that your content is not engaging enough or is being shown to the wrong users.
You can assess the quality of your campaign based on the average values of different ad types. It is difficult to generalize what a good CTR actually is. As a guideline, a click rate of 1% is quite good. However, it depends on many factors. Click-through rates for display campaigns are usually much lower, values of 0.5% are already very good here, while search campaigns with brand keywords should achieve a higher CTR (at least 3%).
Click costs
In order to see return on investment, you not only need a high CTR, but also a CPC (cost per click) that is as low as possible. With a maximum bid, you can limit your click costs upwards, but your goal is of course to stay below the maximum bid. Lower costs per click also mean lower costs per conversion and this allows you to go further and further with your budget.
Ad position
The position of your ad is not only a success factor in itself, but should also always be considered in relation to other key figures. For example, whether your click-through rate is really good depends heavily on the ad rank.
A higher ad rank naturally costs you more, so you should always check whether it generates enough ROI.
Conversion rate
All marketing expenditure is of course null and void without the corresponding conversion rate. Only when you can turn your campaign into clicks and ultimately sales will you be successful in the long term.
Compare which ads and keywords have the best conversion rates and what differences there are in the target groups.
An average conversion rate is between 2-4%, but this figure should be taken with a grain of salt. Specialized industries can have conversion rates of up to 30%.
If your conversion rate is significantly lower, you need to investigate the causes of the bounce rate. When is the purchase decision reversed? On the store page? During the payment process? The conversion rate optimization offers you an approach for optimization.
However, here too, a lower conversion rate with higher visitor numbers may not be particularly efficient, but still generates more profit due to the higher scatter value - especially if the margin per conversion is correspondingly high.
Cost per conversion
Marketing budgets across all industries usually have one thing in common: they are never as high as they should be. It is therefore important to optimize all campaigns for cost per conversion. A good cost per conversion is also very much dependent on your company and conversions. If you sell a product for €10, a cost per conversion of €40 is obviously not a good value. The greater your conversion value (and the greater your margin), the higher the cost per conversion can be.
Learning to use smart bidding - new metrics make Google Ads even more flexible
With the new Google Ads metrics, you have even more opportunities to target your campaigns in a more sophisticated and detailed way. The new metrics include device, location, day of the week, time of day and keyword.
With the right bidding signals, you have an even better chance of converting search queries into conversions. Device and location are particularly important indicators for local commerce, as they allow you to target customers in the vicinity and make them offers. The day of the week also allows for more refined bidding strategies, both for local and international offers.
Restaurants can advertise their lunch menu or even send out discount codes defined by time and location, digital services can be more closely aligned with the time of day. Customers are more likely to see entertainment offers in the evening, the longing for long-distance travel is awakened on the way to work - the possibilities of these new signals are diverse and customers can also enjoy more relevant Google Ads.
Google Ads is not an island
However, there is one important mistake you should never make when dealing with Google Ads and that is viewing your marketing campaigns as a closed microcosm. Especially if the click-through rate is actually delivering promising results and your ad rank is right, but conversions are failing, you should broaden your perspective.
Is the landing page really up to date? How easy is it for customers to get to the desired product after clicking? Are there any major discrepancies between the campaign and the landing page?
Not for nothing is the Keyword Quality Score one of the most important indicators for Google Ads. This key figure looks at the click rate, ad relevance and quality of the target page. Even well-functioning campaigns can fail here if their content is misleading, for example.
To give a negative example: a site that wants to sell an eBook places ads for a popular keyword such as "lose weight quickly". However, the page itself is disastrously designed, offers only poor stock photos and before the content has even loaded, the user's email is to be tapped. This is of course an extreme example, but it shows very nicely how important technical and qualitative SEO measures are in SEA.
With Google Ads metrics, however, you have full control over your campaigns and can compare successes and failures, increase bids and realign ads. You should definitely take advantage of these diverse opportunities.
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