PPC Analysis: 4 Tips for Conducting an Impactful PPC Analysis

Did you know that 65 percent of all high-intent searches result in someone clicking on a pay-per-click (PPC) ad? PPC ads are a great way for you to drive more traffic and leads for your business. By conducting a PPC analysis, you’ll have a better understanding of your campaign and be able to improve your PPC to drive better results.

In this post, we’ll provide you with five key metrics to monitor in your PPC analysis and four tips for conducting a more effective PPC analysis.

5 key metrics for your PPC analysis

As you prepare to set up and conduct your PPC analysis, it’s crucial that you know what to look at for your analysis. Let’s take a look at five metrics that are an integral part of your analysis.

1. Wasted spend

The last thing you want to do when running a PPC analysis is waste money. When analyzing your PPC campaign, you’ll want to look for areas where you might be wasting money on your campaign. When you analyze your campaign, look at your wasted spend ad metric.

This will tell you where you’re wasting money. For instance, you can see your wasted ad spend in your analysis if the ads you’re running are receiving little engagement. This is a key metric to measure because it allows you to optimize areas of your account to spend your money more wisely.

You can refine your keyword selection or optimize the time of day your ad runs to improve your campaign’s performance.

2. Quality score

Your quality score is one of the most important metrics for your PPC campaign. If you’ve ever searched for information on how PPC works, you know that quality score is an important part of the PPC process. Quality score is the score Google gives to your ad to determine your ranking.

Google wants to provide searchers with the most relevant information for their search queries. If you want to get good ad placement, you must create an ad that is relevant to the search query. Google bases your quality score on factors like relevancy, ad copy, and keyword selection.

So, how do you improve quality scores? When you’re looking at this metric, the best way to improve your quality score is to create relevant ad copy. Once you have keywords selected, you need to ensure that your ad copy is relevant to those keywords.

When you conduct an analysis for your PPC strategy, focus on monitoring your quality score and trying to improve it to gain a better ranking.

3. Impression share

Another great metric to monitor is your impression share. Impression share is how often your ads are triggered by relevant search queries. This is an important metric to monitor because it tells you how often your audience searches a relevant query that triggers your ad to appear in the search results.

If you have a low impression share, your ad isn’t appearing in many relevant search results. People aren’t searching for terms attached to your ad, which means they aren’t seeing your ad. It will negatively impact your PPC campaign.

To ensure you’re driving success with your PPC campaign, continue to monitor your impression share to see if your ad is continually triggered in the search results.

4. Clickthrough rate (CTR)

Click-through rate (CTR) is another valuable metric to monitor with your PPC analysis. This is one of the most important metrics for PPC. Your CTR tells you how often people click on your ad to engage with it.

You want to have people clicking on your ad and engaging with the content on your landing page. Having a high impression share isn’t enough if searchers aren’t actively clicking on your ad. You won’t have a high return on investment (ROI) if you don’t have people clicking on your ad.

Monitoring your CTR helps you see if you’re remaining in competition with your competitors. You can see how many clicks you’re getting to see if you’re keeping up engagement on your ads. It’s also a great way to see how your ROI compares to the clicks on your ad to see if your ad copy is relevant and helps drive conversions.

5. Ad text optimization

Your ad’s text is a vital part of your campaign. It can determine whether your audience finds your ad interesting and engages with it, or if they bounce back to the search results to look for a new business. When you conduct your PPC analysis, ensure that you monitor your ad text.

See how your ad text currently affects your CTR, quality score, and ROI. Google Ads’ performance grader will evaluate your ad’s performance and provide you with a benchmark comparison of how your ad text stacks up to your competitors’. By monitoring your text to see how it drives results for your campaign, you will better understand your campaign’s performance and can improve it to drive better results.

5 tips for conducting a practical PPC analysis

So now that you know which metrics to monitor, you can start conducting your PPC analysis. Let’s take a look at five tips to help you conduct a successful PPC analysis.

1. Review your account structure

The first step to conducting a successful PPC analysis is to review your account structure. You can expand, test, and analyze your site to see how you can improve your campaign. So, what should you look for when reviewing your account structure?

• The number of your campaigns
• Your ad groups and how they’re segmented
• Your bidding method
• Your campaign settings
• Your budget

All of these aspects impact your campaign’s performance. Review these different components to ensure they are working for your campaign.

2. Analyze your audience

If you want to conduct a successful PPC audit, the next step is to analyze your audience. Your audience is a key component of your PPC analysis. You want to better understand your audience to ensure you’re creating a campaign that works for them.

First, you’ll want to look at what devices your audience is using to access your PPC ad. Do they look at your PPC ads more on mobile, tablet, or desktop? Knowing this information helps you create a better bid strategy and focus on adapting your ads for whichever device your audience uses most often.

Next, look at who is engaging with your audience. Look at demographic information, socioeconomic status, and interests to better understand your audience. You may find that your target audience is different or includes more people than you originally thought.

When you understand your audience better, you can produce ad copy that resonates better with them. This will lead to higher engagement and more conversions for your business.

3. Look at when you post your ads

To conduct a successful PPC audit, look at when you post your ads. This is a very helpful practice if you have a limited budget and want to maximize it. When you analyze your posting times, you can see the times your ads attract leads and times when you get minimal traffic.

By analyzing your traffic and the times they engage with your ad, you can optimize your campaign to prevent wasted ad spend. You can stop running your ads at times when your audience doesn’t engage with it. By analyzing the times you run your campaigns, you can run a more efficient PPC campaign for your business.

4. Look at your competition

When you conduct a PPC analysis, it’s important that you analyze your competition, too. You must know who you’re going up against and how their campaigns are running compared to yours. One significant aspect you’ll want to analyze is your competition’s keywords.

Keywords are an integral part of your strategy, so it’s important that you analyze your competitors’ keyword selection. Analyzing your competitors’ keywords allows you to find new keywords for your campaign. You get keyword ideas that help you rank for additional keywords.

This is a great way for you to remain competitive. By analyzing your competitors, you’ll better understand who is trying to rank for the same keywords as you. You’ll also get insight into new keywords that you can add to your campaign.

Bonus content: How to conduct a PPC audit

Start conducting your PPC analysis today

PPC analysis helps you gain a stronger understanding of your PPC campaign performance and where you can improve your campaign.

Conducting an analysis will help you optimize your campaign to drive more valuable results for your business. At WebFX, we have over 28 years of experience conducting PPC analysises to help our clients see success with their campaigns. Plus, we’ll compile all of your results into a comprehensive PPC report to keep you in the loop.

If you want to learn more about how you can conduct a successful PPC audit, contact us online to see how we can help!