Do you provide weekly or monthly search marketing reports for clients? How do you decide what data goes into these PPC reports? There are several metrics you can use to gauge the success of the PPC campaigns of your clients, but it’s important to realize that they serve different purposes. It’s important that your clients understand what these metrics mean in terms of growing their revenue. In this resource, you will learn the key metrics to report to clients on PPC campaigns.

Traffic-Focused PPC Metrics

Most search marketers default to traffic focused metrics in an attempt to measure how effective their PPC campaigns are. These include click-through rate and cost per click. Most advertising platforms provide traffic-focused metrics at a glance, making them extremely simple to understand. While these data serves as a good starting point, it’s important to understand that they do not do a great job at depicting the overall picture of your campaigns.

Traffic-focused metrics allow you to determine whether there is enough search demand for your service. They also tell you how many people respond to your online advertisements. However, they do not indicate how much profit you generate from your campaigns. For this reason, it’s important to look beyond traffic and start focusing on conversions.

Conversion Focused PPC Metrics

It’s surprising to learn that there are still countless businesses that fail to set up conversion tracking. If you are already tracking your conversions, then you are already better off than most of your competition. If your marketing dashboard doesn’t have tools for PPC reporting, then you can set up conversion tracking easily enough on advertising platforms like Google AdWords. Keep in mind that this data shouldn’t only include web leads and sales. You must also factor in phone leads in your conversions. Recently, Google has introduced a solution for tracking call conversions for AdWords advertisers.

What’s great about conversion-focused metrics is that they tell you how many leads your campaigns were able to generate. However, they do not tell you how many people availed of your service and how much revenue you raked in. This is why you must use another metric that ultimately gives you information about your bottom line.

ROI Focused PPC Metrics

If you truly want to know how successful your PPC campaigns are, then you should start looking at the golden metric which is ROI. While traffic and conversions can tell how many people are interested in your service, measuring your revenue on a per lead basis enables you to determine the exact campaigns, ads, and keywords that increased your bottom line. This way, you will know where you are making or losing money, allowing you to optimize your future PPC campaigns.

You might be surprised upon learning that your campaigns that receive the highest amount of traffic and conversions may not have the best ROI. Without looking at how valuable your conversions truly are, you will never know where to focus your marketing efforts. You might make adjustments to the wrong campaigns, which essentially means putting your time, effort and resources to waste. Fortunately, it’s easy to set up any PPC platform to produce ROI focused metrics.

Understanding The Purpose Of Each Metric

As a PPC marketer, you must understand that all of the metrics mentioned above are available. The key is in understanding the purpose of each metric. Knowing your traffic data enables you to determine whether the search demand for your ads is good enough to pursue your campaigns. Conversion data give you an idea of how effective your online ads and landing pages are at attracting new leads. And ROI data help you determine the worth of each conversion to your company’s bottom line.