PPC Advertising can be one of the fastest ways to put your business in front of potential customers.
But there is a difference between running paid advertising and running paid advertising well.
A campaign can generate thousands of impressions and hundreds of clicks while producing very little commercial value. Equally, a campaign with relatively modest traffic can generate a consistent stream of high quality enquiries and profitable customers.
The difference often comes down to what you measure and, more importantly, what you do with the information.
After more than 22 years of working with businesses, I have found that the best PPC strategies are built around commercial performance rather than impressive looking numbers. Your PPC agency should be able to explain not only what happened but why it happened and what should happen next.
For businesses working with a PPC Advertising agency in Darlington, understanding the right performance metrics is essential if you want to know whether your marketing budget is genuinely working.
Before looking at individual PPC metrics, there is one important principle to understand.
Not every metric matters equally to every business.
An online retailer may care about purchases and revenue.
A professional services company may care more about qualified enquiries and sales opportunities.
A business selling high value products may be happy to generate fewer leads if those leads are significantly more valuable.
Your PPC agency should therefore understand your business model before deciding which metrics to prioritise.
The objective is not to create the most impressive report.
It is to understand whether PPC is contributing towards profitable growth.
Click through rate, commonly known as CTR, measures the percentage of people who click your advert after seeing it.
A strong CTR can indicate that your advert is relevant to the search being performed.
If people are seeing your advert but rarely clicking, there could be several reasons.
The keyword may not match the user’s intent.
The advert may not communicate a compelling benefit.
Your competitors may be offering a more attractive proposition.
Your messaging may simply need improving.
CTR is therefore useful but it should never be considered a measure of success on its own.
A high CTR does not automatically mean more sales.
Cost per click or CPC, tells you how much you are paying for each click.
This is useful for understanding how efficiently your budget is being used.
However, the cheapest click is not necessarily the best click.
Imagine one campaign generates clicks at £1 each but produces very few enquiries. Another generates clicks at £3 but regularly produces high value customers.
The second campaign could be considerably more profitable.
This is why CPC should always be considered alongside conversion and revenue data.
Conversion rate tells you what percentage of visitors complete a desired action.
That action might be:
– Completing an enquiry form
– Making a purchase
– Booking an appointment
– Calling your business
– Requesting a quotation
– Downloading a valuable resource
A campaign generating 1,000 clicks with a 1% conversion rate produces 10 conversions.
A campaign generating 300 clicks with a 5% conversion rate produces 15.
More traffic does not automatically mean better performance.
Quality matters.
For businesses that generate enquiries rather than direct online purchases, cost per lead can be particularly useful.
If you spend £1,000 on PPC and generate 20 enquiries, your average cost per lead is £50.
But there is another question your PPC agency should be asking.
How many of those 20 leads were actually worth pursuing?
If only five were genuinely qualified, the effective cost of acquiring a qualified lead is much higher.
This is why I recommend looking beyond the headline cost per lead and examining lead quality as well.
Cost per acquisition or CPA, measures how much it costs to acquire a customer.
This is considerably more useful than simply measuring clicks.
If your PPC campaign spends £2,000 and generates 20 new customers, your average acquisition cost is £100.
Whether that is good or bad depends entirely on the value of those customers.
If your average customer generates £1,000 in profit over their lifetime, £100 could represent excellent acquisition efficiency.
If they generate £80, it clearly does not.
Context is everything.
Return on ad spend, commonly abbreviated to ROAS, compares revenue generated with advertising spend.
For example, if you spend £1,000 and generate £5,000 in tracked revenue, your ROAS is 5:1.
This can provide a useful view of campaign efficiency, particularly for ecommerce businesses.
However, ROAS does not necessarily tell you about profitability.
You still need to account for product costs, fulfilment, staffing, overheads and other business expenses.
A good PPC Advertising agency should therefore be able to put advertising performance into the context of your wider commercial model.
Quality Score is a Google Ads metric that can provide useful insight into the relevance and quality of your campaigns.
It considers factors such as expected click through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience.
A low Quality Score may indicate that your keyword, advert and landing page are not sufficiently aligned.
Improving that alignment can potentially help improve campaign efficiency.
However, Quality Score should not become an objective in itself.
The goal is not to achieve a perfect score.
The goal is to generate valuable business outcomes.
Impression share measures the percentage of eligible impressions your adverts are receiving.
If your impression share is low, you may be missing opportunities because of budget limitations, competition or other campaign factors.
This can be particularly useful when your business is trying to increase market share.
Your PPC agency should be able to explain whether additional budget could realistically generate additional valuable opportunities.
Simply increasing spend because your impression share is low is not always the right answer.
One of the most valuable areas of PPC analysis is the search terms report.
This shows the actual searches that triggered your adverts.
It can reveal unexpected opportunities.
It can also uncover irrelevant searches that are wasting your budget.
Your agency should regularly review search terms and use the information to refine targeting and negative keywords.
This is one of the practical ways a well managed campaign becomes more efficient over time.
This is something I believe businesses should pay much more attention to.
A PPC agency can show you a report containing hundreds of leads.
That sounds impressive.
But what if most of those leads are unsuitable?
Your sales team should be able to identify which enquiries are genuinely valuable.
Feed that information back into your PPC strategy.
If certain keywords, audiences or campaigns consistently generate better customers, your budget can be directed towards them.
Marketing and sales should not operate in separate worlds.
Ultimately, businesses do not exist to generate clicks.
They exist to create value and make a profit.
That means your PPC reporting should eventually connect advertising activity with commercial outcomes.
Look at:
– Revenue generated
– Gross profit
– Customer acquisition cost
– Customer lifetime value
– Qualified opportunities
– Closed sales
This is where PPC becomes a genuine business growth tool rather than simply another marketing channel.
A report containing dozens of metrics is not necessarily a good report.
If you cannot understand what the numbers mean or what your agency intends to do about them, the report is not doing its job.
Your PPC agency should be able to explain:
What happened?
Why did it happen?
What worked?
What did not work?
What has changed?
What should we do next?
That is the information business owners actually need.
Myk Baxter Marketing approaches PPC Advertising with a focus on measurable commercial performance rather than simply generating traffic. Established in 2010 and backed by more than 22 years of real world business and digital marketing experience, MBM looks at PPC alongside your wider sales process, customer value and business objectives.
We do not believe every business needs to spend more.
Sometimes the opportunity is to improve targeting.
Sometimes it is the landing page.
Sometimes the issue is lead quality.
Sometimes another marketing channel would produce a better return.
Our role is to identify where your budget can create the greatest commercial value and give you honest advice based on the evidence.
A useful monthly PPC report should give you a clear picture of performance.
Depending on your business, I would expect it to include relevant metrics such as:
– Advertising spend
– Clicks
– CTR
– CPC
– Conversions
– Conversion rate
– Cost per conversion
– Qualified leads
– Revenue
– ROAS
– Search term insights
– Performance by campaign
– Recommendations for improvement
The exact format is less important than the clarity of the information.
You should finish the report knowing whether your PPC is moving in the right direction.
PPC Advertising can deliver excellent results but only when campaigns are managed with the right objectives and measured against meaningful outcomes.
Clicks, impressions and CTR are useful indicators.
But qualified leads, customers, revenue and profit are ultimately much more important.
If I could offer one piece of advice, it would be this: do not allow your PPC agency to hide behind impressive numbers.
Ask what those numbers mean for your business.
A good PPC Advertising agency in Darlington should be able to connect campaign activity with commercial performance, explain what is working and identify where improvements can be made.
The goal should never be simply to spend your budget efficiently.
It should be to turn that budget into profitable opportunities and sustainable business growth.
To know more in details, please call 01325 939 838 to book a free consultation with Myk or one of the team and see what is possible when your website is built properly from the ground up.
Thanks for reading,
Myk Baxter
eCommerce & Digital Marketing Expert
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