If you want to advertise online with Google Ads, then you must know how it works first. Google Ads is the most popular platform for online advertising.
Paid ads are spoken with a data language. Google Ads and Google Analytics generate millions of results and hundreds of reports every day for your account. Your performance is dependent on this data, and studying to analyze and optimize your ads is essential for your success.
As a business owner, you may not have the time and energy to analyze and optimize your data, but here are some of the data metrics you must know for your advertising to work. Remember, there are many more, Google Ads key metrics and measurements. However, these are the top 6 fundamental principles you must know for Google Ads and general ones that apply to each industry possible.
1. Quality Score
Google measures the quality of your ads to determine if it’s an ad that people want to see and whether it’s relevant to them. The better your quality score is, the better the overall performance of your account will be. With a higher quality score than your competitors, your ads will be ranked higher than them.
All of your keywords have a quality score. The score ranges from 1 to 10. If there are keywords with a score below 3, be sure to optimize them.
2. Negative Keywords
Having a list of negative keywords is crucial to maximizing your ROI and campaign. This increases the effectiveness of your paid search and saves you a ton of money. Think of Google Ads as a bidding game, the main way of getting in front of the right people is by bidding on the right keywords. You should exclude keywords that are irrelevant to your target audience.
Stop throwing money away, and build your negative keywords list. The most effective way to find these negative keywords is to analyze customer data. Thankfully, Google Ads provides you the amazing keyword planner that helps you plan your keywords out; this is a great way to start.
3. Impression Share
Impression share is the number of searches performed for your keyword divided by the number of times your ad was shown. You can view this data at different levels; campaign, ad group, and keywords.
When users search for your keywords, the larger the exposure share, the higher the exposure to your ads compared to your competitors. This data directly reflects on the competitiveness of your account. In general, over 50% is considered as qualified.
4. Click-Through Rate
The click-through rate is the clicks divided by impressions. The higher the click-through rate, the higher the relevance of the keywords to the ad copy, which can effectively improve the quality score of the keywords and lower the average cost-per-click. Different levels of CTR for different industries require specific analysis.
Your CTR directly affects your quality score. It determines how many people want to click on your ads, therefore making your ad either relevant or irrelevant. A reason for a low CTR could be the irrelevancy, or bad copywriting.
5. Long-Tail Keywords
Use a lot of long-tail keywords. Although the flow of these keywords is not high, the conversion rate is much higher than a very general keyword. This is because the long-tail keyword is more purposeful and much more specific.
With long-tail keywords, you are reaching a lot more of your target audience. Usually, the CPC will be lower for them as well.
6. Account Activity
Continually optimizing the advertising account is like insisting on exercising. Regular optimization will help your quality score. This is a long-term strategy to make sure your account is following Google’s algorithm. Accounts with no activity are penalized and given a lower quality score.
Get on your advertising account and check all of these fundamental Google Ads principles.
If you have questions about specific data metrics, or if you want to find an optimization method for the specific problems of your account, Noah Digital Marketing is your best choice!
The Noah Team is an official, certified Google Partner with 15+ years of industry experience.
