5 Adwords Metrics that Count

Not sure where to start in Adwords? These stats come first.

To manage your Adwords campaign effectively, you need to know how each metric can help you improve your site and better engage your audience. If you’re new to the game, though, you don’t have to be intimidated by the mass of statistics that you’re asked to juggle. To help you get started navigating in Adwords, we’ve assembled the following vital metrics, with some information on why they matter.

Quality Score

Google is in the business of getting users where they want to go—and an irrelevant ad makes Google look bad to the customer, who is then less likely to trust Google’s results in the future. For this reason, Google rewards quality and punishes misdirection and manipulation with a high or low quality score, which determines to a large extent the cost of your advertising and the exposure you receive. These are the factors Google uses:

• Does the text of your ad match your chosen keyword?
• Does clicking your ad take the user somewhere relevant to the ad text (or is the ad misleading)?
• How often does your ad get clicked (also known as click-through rate or CTR)?

Landing Page Optimization

Google likes your ad to link directly to a specific, relevant landing page; for instance, if provide SEO services and your ad relates to Pay-Per-Click, an Adwords newbie might just have the link direct the user to your homepage; but your ad will score better if it links the user directly to your pay-per-click services. The general rule is that clicking your ad should send the user directly to the product or service you advertise. Even if Google didn’t track this metric, it’s basic common sense; people don’t like clicking ads, so if a customer is interested enough in your business to click through, it’s silly to make them dig through your site map to find the product or service you want them to buy. For the sake of your business, your users, and your Adwords campaign, your ad needs to provide the shortest possible distance between reading the ad and buying the product.

Bounce Rate

It’s important for marketers to measure how many pages of your site your users are viewing after clicking on your ad. If users click your ad only to click away disappointed a moment later, you’ve wasted your money and the user’s time. Users who click your ad should have instant access to the information they need—and then have a reason to stick around. By creating engaging content and smooth navigation throughout your site, you can bump up this metric and improve the effectiveness of your advertising. This is one of the more interesting metrics to examine, because what constitutes “good content” is fairly subjective; but it can also be a huge factor in the success of your Adwords campaign.

Time on Site

For the same reason your bounce rate is important, it’s equally important to consider how long users spend on your site (as it’s an important indicator of how useful and/or interesting they find your content). Improving this metric is a matter of maintaining content that is rich enough to keep the user on your site, but not so dense that they’re intimidated or bored.

Conversion Rate

Conversion is probably the most significant metric for your business, because everything else is just numbers unless you can convert ad-clicks into revenue. Conversion rate is a simple metric that examines the ratio between how many people visited your site versus how many did some action. The more you turn clicks into leads, and leads into satisfied customers, the higher your conversion rate will be.

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