It’s easy to look at a PPC ads dashboard and assume a campaign is performing well. Your impressions seem to be increasing, clicks are coming through and your ads are appearing in search results. But these numbers alone don’t tell you whether your advertising is contributing to your business goals.
A successful PPC ads campaign should reach the right audience and encourage them to take action to ultimately contribute to business results.
So, how do you know if your PPC ads are working?
The answer lies in assessing the full journey from search to conversion. By understanding the right PPC metrics and what they mean for your business, you can identify what is working, where your campaign may be falling short and what you can do to improve performance.
What Does a Successful PPC Ads Campaign Look Like?
Before deciding whether your PPC ads are working, you need to establish what success actually means for your business.
PPC advertising can have different objectives. An eCommerce business may want to generate online sales while a service-based business may be focused on enquiries, phone calls or quote requests.
A campaign designed to increase awareness will be measured differently from one designed to generate immediate conversions. This means there is no single metric that determines whether a PPC campaign is successful.
But for most business, a successful PPC ads campaign should:
- Reach the right audience
- Attract relevant search traffic
- Generate conversions
- Produce quality leads or sales
- Deliver a return that makes sense for the business
A campaign that receives thousands of impressions and click isn’t necessarily successful if those visitors aren’t taking action. For example, 1,000 clicks might look impressive but if those clicks generate only one enquiry, the campaign may not be delivering the results your business needs.
This is why PPC ads performance should be assessed as a complete journey instead of looking at just one number.
How to Know If Your PPC Ads Are Working
If you’re wondering “Are my PPC ads working?”, start by looking at what happens after someone sees or clicks your advertisement.
Search Traffic
PPC advertising can place your business in front of users searching for products or services like yours, but not every search represents genuine purchase intent.
Reviewing the search terms triggering your ads and asking whether they are relevant to your offering and target customer will help you ensure you are directing the right search traffic to your campaign.
A premium office furniture business could attract searches for “cheap office furniture” and while the search is related to the product, the user isn’t the right customer for the business.
Relevant traffic is more valuable than generating a high number of visits, so if your campaign is attracting irrelevant searches, refining your keyword targeting and adding negative keywords can help reduce wasted spend.
Click-Through Rate
Click-through rate (CTR) measures the percentage of people who see your ad and click on it.
A strong CTR can indicate that your ad is relevant to the search and gives users a reason to visit your website, whereas a low CTR could suggest that your targeting, messaging or offer isn’t connecting with the audience.
However, CTR should be assessed alongside other metrics rather than alone. This is because a high CTR doesn’t always mean your PPC ads are working if those clicks aren’t generating conversions. The goal is to attract people who are likely to become customers, not just to get them to click.
Conversion Rate
Once someone clicks your PPC ad, you need to know whether they take the action you want.
Your conversion rate measures the percentage of visitors who complete that desired action, which could include:
- Making a purchase
- Submitting an enquiry
- Requesting a quote
- Booking an appointment
- Calling your business
- Completing a contact form
If your PPC ads generate plenty of traffic but very few conversions, there may be an issue with your targeting, ad messaging, landing page or website experience.
Cost Per Conversion
Cost per conversion shows how much you are spending on advertising, on average, to generate a conversion.
Whether that cost is feasible depends on the value of the conversion to your business. A $100 cost per lead could be worthwhile for a business selling a high-value service but difficult to justify for a low-value product.
Instead of comparing your results with an arbitrary benchmark, consider whether your acquisition cost makes sense based on your margins, customer value and sales process.
Quality of Leads
Lead generation campaigns should prioritise consideration of their enquiries.
Are the people contacting you genuinely interested in your products or services? Do they fit your target customer? Are they progressing to sales?
A campaign that generates 20 relevant enquiries is more valuable than one generating 100 low quality leads, which is why lead quality should be considered alongside conversion volume when assessing PPC ads performance.
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
Return on ad spend (ROAS) measures the revenue generated in relation to your advertising spend.
For example, spending $1,000 on PPC ads and generating $4,000 in attributed revenue would produce a 4:1 ROAS.
This can be particularly useful for eCommerce businesses where revenue can be directly linked to advertising activity.
For lead generation campaigns, revenue might not occur immediately after a conversion. In these cases, lead quality and cost per sales provide valuable additional insight.
Ultimately, your PPC ads should generate a return that makes commercial sense for your business.
Why Your PPC Ads Aren’t Delivering Results
If your PPC ads aren’t performing as expected, this can be affected by everything from keyword targeting and ad relevance to your website and conversion tracking.
- Broad keyword targeting: Broad or poorly matched keywords can cause your ads to appear for searches that aren’t related to your specific products or services. Google recommends reviewing your search terms and adding negative keywords to prevent your ads from attracting low-intent or irrelevant traffic.
- Ad messaging doesn’t match search intent: Search intent is what a user looks for when they enter a query. If your ad doesn’t address that intent, users may ignore it or click without being interested in your offering. Your PPC ads should connect the user’s search with your messaging and the action you want them to take.
- Landing page friction: If your ad is slow to load, difficult to navigate or doesn’t match the advertisement, visitors may leave before taking action. Page speed is particularly important on mobile, where delays can make users more likely to abandon a page.
- Incomplete conversion tracking: If actions like purchases, enquiry forms, phone calls or bookings aren’t tracked correctly, your PPC data won’t provide an accurate picture of campaign performance.
- Ineffective budget allocation: If a large proportion of your budget is going towards clicks that rarely convert, reallocating spend towards higher-performing areas can improve campaign efficiency.
- Campaign isn’t regularly optimised: PPC ads performance can change as search behaviour, competitors, costs and conversion patterns change. Regularly reviewing search terms, CTR, conversion rates and cost per conversion can help identify wasted spend and opportunities to improve PPC results.
How Can Site Clicks Help?
Site Clicks helps businesses assess their PPC performance across the entire customer journey, from keyword targeting and ad messaging through to landing pages, conversion tracking and campaign optimisation.
If you’re unsure whether your PPC ads are delivering the results they should, talk to Site Clicks about improving your PPC ads campaign performance.
