We get it: running your own Google Ads campaign can be hard work. And, with a plethora of metrics, acronyms and jargon to understand, it can quickly become off-putting. That’s why we’ve put together a list of the key things to look out for, to understand whether or not your campaigns are working.

Here are some key metrics to check:

CTR

Click-through rate. You’ll see CTR listed a lot on Google Ads and its reports, and it’s one of the most important metrics to monitor. CTR is a measurement of how many clicks you get as a percentage of those that see your ad.

The best practice for CTR is a minimum of 2%, and 3% is good! If you’ve hit 3% CTR with all of your keywords, you’re in good stead. If your CTR is low, check the relevance of your keywords to your ads. For example, are all of your keywords reflected in your ad copy? If someone is searching for “roses with next day delivery” and they see your ad, does your ad copy reflect these things? If not, tweak your ad copy to make it more relevant for a quick CTR boost.

SIS

Search Impression Share. Your SIS is a measure of how many impressions your ads received vs what they could’ve had. As well as SIS itself, it’s important to look at ‘SIS lost’ metrics. ‘SIS lost’  or ‘Search lost IS’ is a measurement of how many potential impressions – views of your ad – you missed out on, and Google gives you either budget or rank as contributing factors. So ‘SIS lost (rank)’ and ‘SIS lost (budget)’ are two critical things to review – and will have their own respective percentages – and you’ll need to make changes to boost your rank or budget available to improve the volume of impressions you’re missing out on.

While there’s no best practice here – it varies between industries – anything higher than 20% for rank and 10% for budget should be investigated and remedied.

Quality score

One of the few metrics that isn’t an acronym, quality score is the critical hub of a successful Ads campaign. Your quality score is a measure of the relevancy of your keywords, ads and landing pages. For example, does your keyword match the copy on your landing page? Does your ad reflect your keyword? Does your ad copy reflect your landing page?

Your quality score is one of the biggest bidding factors when you’re going up against the competition. A good quality score allows you not only to beat your competitors to the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), it also allows you to pay less per click – making your budget stretch further.

If your quality score is low, (<5/10), then review the relevancy between your keywords, ad copy and landing pages to improve this. Ideally, you’ll want to realistically aim for ~8/10 to really feel the benefits.

Conv. rate

Conversion rate. This is a measure of conversions based on the number of ad interactions over a time period. Generally speaking, a conversion rate of 2% is where you want to be, and higher than this for brand terms. However, the keys to an accurate conversion rate measurement are:

• Having conversion tracking set up and it working accurately
• Measuring multiple actions on your website

So if you’re only measuring phone calls or chat messages, your conversion rate will reflect this – but may miss out on monitoring critical conversions such as phone calls, leads or sales.

Here at Conteur, our PPC team work day in and day out with the plethora of Google metrics and acronyms! If you need a helping hand getting your Google Ads back on track, contact us today.