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(Article first published in April '08. It has been modified slightly to suit its publication on our site)
In this third and last article on the Google Adwords system I am going to cover how Google provides a great deal of feedback that lets users track just how their ads are performing.
How You Track Your Ad Performance.
Unlike any other advertising medium, with Google Adwords you can easily review the performance of your ad/s and the whole campaign overall. This is all done through the Adwords web interface. Once you have created an account and one or more ads, after only 24 hours you will be able to see a whole host of information on them.
Fig 1 - Campaign Performance Overview
The details in Fig. 1 show a snapshot of a small campaign that I run. The graph shows the number of clicks by day over a period of 8.5 days. Beneath this is indicated that I received 79 clicks in total and that the ads were shown 1,722 impressions. This gives me a click-through rate of 4.59%.
Let's pause at this point to review what's so important about click-through rate. Google considers anything below 0.25% as poor and most advertisers should be aiming for anything between 1% - 10% on average (dependent on what they are advertising). The click-through rate is an indicator of how appealing your ad is, but it is very important to remember that if you are achieving a very high click-through rate but you are not seeing actual revenue return, then your ads are too generic and are attracting entirely the wrong visitors!
The 'Average CPM' shown in Fig. 1 is the cost per thousand clicks and for some advertisers this is very important. The 'Average CPC' is your average cost-per-click, which helps you define your overall daily budget. For instance, my CPC is €2.28 and my daily budget is €20. This means that I am limited to between 8 and 9 clicks per day maximum before my budget runs out. Finally we see the total cost for the campaign over the 8.5 days that it was running.
Reviewing Performance By Ad
You can also drill into each individual ad to review more detailed data...
Fig 2 - Performance by Ad
In Fig. 2 we see a snapshot of my Logo Design ad. This page however breaks down the detail by keyword. You can see how much I am bidding, as well as all the same data as shown in the summary page. Take note here that some of the keywords are generating a click-through rate of 33%, which I am very pleased with. However another interesting statistic shown is the "Avg Pos", which shows that my ads are being shown on average between position 1.4 and 2.0 on the page.
There is much, much more that can be tracked, but if this is all you tracked, then you would already be doing well.
The "Real" Performance Of Your Ads
Google Adwords is an incredibly versatile and powerful advertising medium, but like any other advertising medium the most important figure to track is your revenue return. If Adwords is not delivering a return, then your ads may not be setup correctly or Adwords may not be a good choice for you.
Franco De Bonis has worked in the field of sales and marketing promotion since 1990 and was most recently the global marketing manager for a major international technology company before setting up DG Group in January 2007.
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