KPIs & metrics

Importance of PPC Tracking

PPC tracking is a way of assessing and improving the performance of pay-per-click (PPC) marketing campaigns, it is known to be an important part of search engine advertising. The truth is that when results are not being tracked, then it’s quite difficult to be sure whether ad spend is making a difference in the bottom line.

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Gintaras Baltusevičius

Feb 14 2020 4 min read

Importance of PPC Tracking

Table of Contents

  • PPC Monitoring
  • What is PPC conversion tracking
  • Conversions Explained in Full Details
  • How Will Conversion Tracking Help Drive My Sales
  • Using Conversion Tracking with Google Adwords
  • Conclusion

This brings us to the importance of PPC tracking, which means one can only be sure that the PPC budget is driving the business growth by tracking the results. And by doing that, you are surely keeping a close tab on key metrics like:

  • Total costs
  • Cost per click
  • Quality score
  • Click-through rate
  • Cost per conversion

PPC Monitoring

When talking about PPC campaigns, who wouldn’t want enough sales to increase their profit. We all want to reduce our costs and at the same time improve sales and also clicks. PPC marketing is always a great way to attracts different visitors to your website.

Monitor your budgets and PPC expenditures on a PPC dashboard.

Though the thing there is, it is so easy to lose a lot of money if one is not careful. Just to avoid that great loss and make sure PPC campaigns are working, you need to make sure they are being monitored. And this is where PPC monitoring comes into play.

Although there is software used in monitoring and reporting PPC campaigns. The programs help in identifying keywords that are bringing PPC traffic.

What is PPC conversion tracking

Conversion is one of the powerful metrics PPC advertisers have when determining the success of their digital advertising programs. Despite this, there have been no two platforms that seem to track conversion just the same.

An optimal PPC dashboard will allow you to track conversion rates and budgets of each PPC platform you use.

The scope of this article is to give you a complete understanding of the importance of PPC conversion tracking. Once you understand it, you can start building your PPC dashboard.

Conversions Explained in Full Details

The most common about conversion tracking is that it’s only effective for purchases made online. The truth is, a conversion is an important action made by a visitor on a website. For example, when someone subscribes to a blog or even downloads a whitepaper, these are tracked as a conversion.

See how your conversion rates change over time in a PPC dashboard.

I think with the quick definition of what conversion stated above, you can suggest that an action has to have a meaningful interaction with the product obtained from marketing efforts. Though the definition of conversion tends to be wide since there are various actions performed depending on what the web page is all about.

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How Will Conversion Tracking Help Drive My Sales

After understanding what conversion is, then it is important to know how it can improve sales. Online engagement being a new frontier in SEM is a fact that can’t be ignored. However, measuring something just as simple as click-through rates from a Google ad to any organization landing page might not be necessarily useful when talking about increasing sales for a short term, but with the effectiveness of conversion tracking, you can surely figure out where PPC traffic is heading and where exactly to focus both hard and soft sales pitches.

Conversion numbers by channel, showcased in a simple pie chat.

Don’t think it’s magic, because I’ve come across people who think a new idea gives instant results. You don’t expect that tracking conversions and analyzing PPC data will increase sales overnight, it only guarantees a smarter marketing decision. Just to be clear, you will be able to identify which keywords and search queries generated the conversions and be sure of where to focus your future campaigns, which will in no doubt increase sales over time. In a nutshell, PPC conversion tracking will not only help in increasing your sales, it will also make you have a clear plan on how to get more sales.

Using Conversion Tracking with Google Adwords

Google’s AdWords is a PPC monitoring software, it has been known to be one of the simplest tools that are mostly used to begin conversion tracking. It simply allows for the measurement of custom-defined conversions with individually generated code which can be tacked onto almost any page virtually.

Truth be told, if you are using AdWords effectively, then I doubt it if you are going to have any question on your return investment for AdWords.

Why Does PPC Conversion Tracking Matters

If you didn’t skip this part, then I am sure you don’t need to wonder why it matters because the basic reason has been stated on the journey to this section. But one can’t be too sure so, below are 6 reasons why I think conversion tracking for PPC truly is important:

  • It sheds light on where user experience needs to improve
  • It will help you make more profitable advertising decisions
  • It helps in identifying the keywords and Ads that are working for you
  • It helps in providing an in-depth look at what offers and promotions are working
  • It enables more manageable bidding options
  • It helps in providing a historical data-based benchmark

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The Different Types of Conversion Tracking

There is arguably a lot of conversion tracking, but it has been able to be broken out into 5 main groups. The process of conversion tracking works a bit different for each source of conversion, asides offline conversions, each type of conversion tends to fall between the following categories:

  • Phone calls: calls that occur directly from your ads
  • Local actions: this is counted when the action being made is specific to a physical location
  • App installs and in-app actions
  • Website actions: this means an action that is being performed on your website. For example, sign-up or product purchase
  • Import: A customer activity that begins online and later finishes offline

Conclusion

I know after going through this article, you now already have a clear understanding of why PPC conversion tracking in digital marketing is very important. One can even say it is what makes digital marketing different.

It can be quite a difficult task to set up a conversion tracking and also make sure it’s effectively working, but the better side of it is that, when done, you’re not only managing your time, you also have higher chances of making a lot of sales.

We have made a PPC dashboard template for you to use, and you can try it for free now. Just connect the desired PPC marketing tools you use, and all of the latest metrics will be extracted automatically. You can monitor ALL marketing metrics - from all of your clients - in one place.

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Published on Feb 14 2020

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WRITTEN BY

Gintaras Baltusevičius

Gintaras is an experienced marketing professional who is always eager to explore the most up-to-date issues in data marketing. Having worked as an SEO manager at several companies, he's a valuable addition to the Whatagraph writers' pool.