What Sorts Of Metrics Are Necessary?

When you establish your pay per click campaign, do you define your goals and measure them according to metrics that are useful? I ask the question because most advertisers don’t. The bottom line is ROI and to measure ROI successfully you have to have pre-defined criteria beyond merely calculable numbers. In fact, you can’t get too specific with the numbers because they aren’t always accurate. It is better to judge ROI according to trends.

For instance, narrowing down the number of clicks to a specific number is not really helpful as any given analytics tool will not be 100% accurate on any given day. Instead, you should look at ups and downs by percentage over a period of time. Did your clicks increase while your conversions decreased from one month to the next? By what percentages did those increases and decreases occur? By focusing on the long-term trends, you can get a better picture of how your pay per click campaigns are going than you’ll ever get by looking at one day’s performance and the total number of conversions last month. The reason is because a number is just a number. Outside of the context of a given trend it doesn’t really mean anything.

To analyze advertising campaigns more successfully, you should study the trends over a period of weeks and months for your click-throughs, conversions, effective CPM, and total ROI. It is only by graphic the trends that you can make reasonable decisions about the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns.