How Will I Know if my AdWords Campaign is Working?

A very common concern for new AdWords users is figuring out if it’s money well spent or money wasted. It’s an understandable concern that can be avoided if you plan ahead. There are a few things that business owners would need to think about when deciding if the campaign is working.

What action do I want to drive with these ads?

By this we mean, do you want these ads to produce more phone calls? Do you want more leads through the website? Do you want a video on your landing page to be watched?

It’s important to know what you want to be measured before setting up the processes to measure that action. Google offers excellent tools and integration with Analytics to be able to measure phone call data as well as submissions through your website or users watching a video.

Where can I locate this information in the AdWords dashboard?

Now that you’ve decided what you want to measure and you’ve set up the measuring processes, you’ll need to be able to find that information.

When you’re in the Google AdWords dashboard, many metrics are hidden so that you can customize what you want to see. To access all of the possible metrics, you’ll need to locate this “Columns” button.

Then choose “Modify Columns”, and you’ll find all of the metrics that you can choose to see. Some of the metrics that we at The Web Guys find most useful include the following:

1. Conversions: This is where you’d see the totals for the measurable actions you’ve set up, including phone calls and form submissions.
2. Cost/Conversion: This indicates how much money you’re spending for each conversion that has occurred. If this metric is very high, you may need to make some changes to your ads or landing pages.
3. Search Lost IS (budget): This metric indicates how much impression share was lost because of a budget that’s too small. By knowing this, it may help to determine that you’re not spending enough to get the return you want.
4. Analytics metrics: The bounce rate, pages per session, and average session duration metrics can help to determine if you’re getting quality visits to your site from your campaign. Sometimes if you’re receiving a low number of conversions, you can still determine whether or not you’re getting quality traffic. Quality traffic would have a low bounce rate (20-30%), high pages per session, and a longer session duration.

By determining what you want to measure and extracting that information from your campaign data, you’ll have a clear view on how well your campaign is working. However, before you call it quits based on a couple weeks of data, consider what improvements you can make to your campaign to achieve better results. This could include targeting different geographic areas, keywords, or writing new ads. You could even try using a new landing page to direct these visits.

Whether you’re just starting a new campaign or needing to revamp an existing campaign, you can count on The Web Guys to do it right. Contact us today at (317) 805-4933 to discuss your digital marketing strategies.