Measuring Website Traffic

If your main advertising goal is to drive traffic to your website, try focusing on increasing your clicks and clickthrough rate (CTR). You’ll want to start by creating great ad text and choosing strong keywords so your ads are relevant and compelling to your customers.

When prospects search in Google, then they scan the results quickly and decide which one to click on. That means if you don’t have compelling ad copy, then your prospects are going to click on your competitors’ ads instead of your ads. Here are some important things you can measure to help you track and improve a campaign focused on traffic:

A. Clicks and clickthrough rate (CTR):

These two Adwords metrics help you understand how many people found your ad appealing enough to actually click on it and visit your website. You can use your CTR to gauge how closely your ad matches your keywords and other targeting settings.

1. Clicks – When someone clicks your ad, like on th

e headline of a text ad, Google AdWords counts that as a click. Typically the more ad clicks the better as this means more people are coming to your website from the ads. Clicks can help you understand how well your ad is appealing to people who see it. Relevant, highly-targeted ads are more likely to receive clicks.

2. Click Through Rate (CTR) –  Click-through rate (CTR) is one of the purest Adwords metrics and is the lifeblood of any good Google AdWords account. It is easily evaluated by dividing clicks by ad impressions. CTR can be used to help you determine the quality of your imagery, positioning, and keywords. CTR helps evaluate how well you are communicating with searchers and can help determine the relevance and effectiveness of your campaign. A high ratio of clicks to ad impressions is an indication that you are targeting the right audience with appropriate keywords and ad text, and those searchers are responding by clicking through to your site – whereas a low CTR is pointing out that there is some disconnect between you and your audience.

CTR is relative to your competition. If your competitors have a 2% CTR and your ads have a 5% CTR, then you have more compelling ads. If your competitors have a 5% CTR and you have a 2% CTR, then your ads need to be improved.

Simple enough right? Well, actually Google AdWords doesn’t tell you your competitors’ CTR. Instead, they reveal your Quality score. Every keyword in your account is assigned a Quality Score and one of the biggest factors is your CTR.

3. Quality Score – Quality Score is intended to give you a general sense of the quality of your ads. The 1-10 Quality Score reported for each keyword in your account is an estimate of the quality of your ads and landing pages triggered by them. Three factors determine your Quality Score:

Expected clickthrough rate

Ad relevance

Landing page experience

Even two keywords within the same Ad Group can have different Quality Scores. So, having a high Quality Score means that our systems think your ad and landing page are relevant and useful to someone looking at your ad.

B. Keywords:

A keyword, in the context of search engine optimization, is a particular word or phrase that describes the contents of a Web page and something that the user searches for and sees your ads.

You’ll want to monitor your keyword performance with the following strategies:

Pause or remove words or phrases that aren’t working well for you and add new ones. You can use columns and segments to review your keywords’ clicks, CTR, Quality Score, and more.

Use keyword match types to control who sees your ads. With some match types, you’ll get more ad impressions, clicks, and conversions and with others you’ll get fewer ad impressions and more narrow targeting.

Run a keyword diagnosis to get more information about your keywords’ Quality Scores and whether they’re triggering your ads.

Identify off-topic keywords that you’ll want to add to your negative keyword list so that it doesn’t show up again.

C. Search Terms:

Use the Search terms Adwords metrics to review the list of searches that have triggered your ad, and identify the relevant terms that are driving traffic to your website and add them as new keywords. You’ll also want to add terms that are irrelevant to your business as negative keywords so they won’t trigger your ads.

D. Impression Share:

Impression share is the number of ad impressions your ads are currently getting versus the total available ad impressions for your keywords. For example, if there are 1,000 searches for one of your keywords and your ads are displayed for 900 of those searches, then your impression share would be 90%. If your impression share is lower than 95 – 99%, then there is opportunity to get even more ad impressions. Note that you’ll likely never get 100% impression share because Google is always rotating different advertisers.

E. Avg. Position:

A statistic that describes how your ad typically ranks against other ads. This rank determines in which order ads appear on the page. The highest position is “1,” and there is no “bottom” position. An average position of 1-8 is generally on the first page of search results, 9-16 is generally on the second page, and so on. Average positions can be between two whole numbers. For example, an average position of “1.7” means that your ad usually appears in positions 1 or 2.

Your ad’s rank can change, causing its position on the page to fluctuate as well, so your average position can give you an idea of how often your ad beats other ads for the position. You can see an “Avg. Pos.” column for your ads, campaigns, and other elements, but the average position is generally most useful to look at for your keywords. By seeing how your ad typically ranks when it’s triggered by one of your keywords, you can try to influence your position by changing the keyword’s bid.

Google Adwords Detailed Process

When you log into Google AdWords, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. On almost every page you’ll find a new table full of data, along with a graph that charts your different Adwords metrics over a given date range. For more experienced advertisers, the robust reporting capabilities are great for digging into pay per click advertising and campaigns to make improvements.

If you want to increase your impression and get relevant people to your website you can focus on exact match rather than broad match. However, if you’re just getting started with Google AdWords, then it’s almost impossible to know where to look. In other words, how do you know which Adwords metrics are really important to review?

“Without the right marketing metrics, you are shooting in the dark. The only way to know if things are working for you or not is those metrics.” — Ian Brodie

To answer that question, we need to take a step back and look at why we’re reviewing all these Adwords metrics in the first place. Ultimately, the goal is to use the data to improve the performance of your advertising campaigns and to make your ad campaigns more appealing and make it the most successful ad campaigns across all your networks. To use Google AdWords more effectively, it’s important to understand the business goals you’re trying to achieve and the data that’s most relevant to those goals. Below we’ll go over different Adwords metrics to focus on based on your goals.