As a kid, you undoubtedly played a few hide-and-seek games. If you played the traditional version, you closed your eyes, counted to a predetermined number and then tried to find the hiders. Alternatively, you could have played sardines (where only one child hides and is sought by the rest).
There are many variations of this game, and some of them even follow us into adulthood. For instance, love may play hide-and-seek with you, from time to time. You know it’s out there, you’re looking for a partner, but they seem slightly out of your reach.
The non-fun adult game of hide-and-seek is often present in PPC, too. Many of the best features are tucked away in places you don’t think to look. Luckily, I’ve done the searching for you.
Below, five PPC metrics you should, but probably aren’t, using are presented. If you’re able to take advantage of these tucked-away techniques, your hard work will certainly pay off.
1) Bounce Rate
Every marketer dreads users that visit a landing page, fail to take action and leave instantaneously. These people drain your precious money and hurt your conversion rates—but why?
Users bounce for a variety of reasons. They might not have meant to click on your link the first place. They might give up on your site before you convert them into a customer. It all depends on the structure of your conversion point.
To identify where they’re exiting, pull up your Google Analytics. Then, navigate to “Traffic Sources”, and select the advertisement you’re working on.
Once your item is highlighted, fill in the columns as follows: column one,“Keywords,” column two, “Landing Page” column three, “Visits,” column four, “Bounce Rate.” Under “Views,” choose “Comparison.”
From here, you can look at one or more of your landing pages and gain insight into your bounce rates. If your users have to click through your website to accomplish your call to action (CTA), this will identify where you lose visitors in the multi-step process.
2) Revenue Per Visitor
You’re tracking your clicks, spend and conversions, but do you know your Revenue per Visitor (RPV)? If not, it’s time to change your ways.
If you’re an e-commerce company that generates $100 in sales for every 200 visitors, your PRV is $0.50. If your CTA isn’t financially-based, you can still use this same breakdown to calculate your Leads per Visitor.
Whether you’re tracking money or leads, there should be a positive correlation between the number of people that visit your website and your sales.
Here’s where the PRV magic comes in: if you have a higher Revenue per Visitor rate than your competitors, you’ll dominate the online marketplace. Say your competitor has a revenue per visitor of $2.00. As long as your rate is higher than their rate, you can bid $2.01 on PPC advertising and beat out the competition. Companies with lower rates than you won’t be able to match you without losing money.
3) Call Tracking
Did you know that Adwords can help you track search-related phone conversions? Seriously, it can chronicle and organize all of your important conversations with people that are far enough down the sales funnel to give you a call.
With Call Extensions, you can track a phone call down to the keyword level. All you need to do is go to AdWords and select the “Ad extensions” folder under “Campaigns.” Next, choose “Call Extensions,” and click the “+Extension button.” You’ll then follow some prompts and enter the phone number you want to track or create a Google forwarding number that you can use.
Another tool is Google’s Website Call Conversions, which lets you put a phone number directly on your website. This dynamic phone number placement is free of charge, and it can provide you with additional information that Call Extensions doesn’t cover.
4) Return On Ad Spend
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) is very much like Return on Investment (ROI). ROAS is the return that comes from your PPC expenditures. If you need to calculate this metric, divide the profit you gain from an ad campaign by the overall cost of the campaign.
The result will tell you if you’re losing money, breaking even or making money. With this number in mind, you can understand where your ads are financially and where they need to go.
When you do this, try to remember that ROI can be a long-term game. Sometimes it’s OK to lose money or break even in the short-term, as long as you have an overall goal in place and are investing in a plan that’ll bring in more revenue down the line.
Here’s an example: say you sell holiday wreaths. You advertise your products, and it takes you $50 to acquire one converting customer. The converting customer purchases a $50 wreath, so you break even. When this happens, you might be tempted to shut down the campaign and call it a wash, but it doesn’t have to be …
If you take the customer’s information down and send them an email or give them a call in 10 months, you can remind them that it’s time to buy another holiday wreath. Either you can upsell them to a new product, or maybe you can convince them to purchase several affordable wreaths under $30 for all of their holiday gifts this year. Suddenly, the $50 you spent to acquire the customer has a significant ROI.
5) All Conversions
To succeed in the world of PPC, you need to understand all of your conversions. On AdWords, make sure you check out the “All Conversions” metric in addition to the regular “Conversions” column. This expanded version will supply you with the data in your “Conversions” column, but it’ll also show you cross-device conversions, store visits and more.
Since customers generally take time to make buying decisions and access information on more than one device, you can use “All Conversions” to understand how your customers convert. In the AdWords “Tools” section, there’s something called “Device Path” that outlines how consumers use different devices and travel down the buyer’s path.
Another conversion feature that shouldn’t be overlooked is “Custom Columns.” Here, you can create your own metrics. With the right know-how, you can exclude soft metrics to focus on the ones that really matter.
Conclusion
Hide-and-seek is either really run or really annoying. If you’re a 7-year-old playing with friends at a birthday party, it’s a lot of fun. If you’re a busy professional trying to market your company, it’s really annoying.
Luckily, with the five less-known metrics above, you can get a clear picture of the PPC playing field and improve your outcomes.