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If you really want to run profitable PPC campaigns, you need to know what Google Ads metrics you’re aiming to track, and how to optimize for each one effectively. Learn more from Polymer.
Success with Google Ads has nothing to do with luck — it's about knowledge, experience, and diligence in tracking the right metrics.
This means leaving no room for guesstimates and hunches. If you really want to figure out the Google Ads puzzle, you need to look at the numbers and understand the story they're trying to tell.
Read on to learn more about Google Ads metrics, what they are, and how to track them effectively.
Google Ads metrics help you track, diagnose, and optimize the performance of your Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaigns. They help you lose the guesswork and dive straight into the hard facts — helping you make sharper decisions that will get results.
The good news is, Google Ads comes with built-in reporting tools to help you stay on top of the important numbers. The platform automatically collects the data while you focus on running your campaign.
To access your Google Ads reports, log into your dashboard, go to 'Campaigns,' and click 'Insights and reports.'
Now that you don't have to worry about data collection, it's high time you know what you should be tracking in the first place.
Here are 10 of the most important Google Ads metrics you should track:
The "cost" metric calculates the total costs across your Google Ads reporting timeline. It's readily available from the built-in reports and tracked as a scorecard.
Monitoring costs is paramount to ensuring the profitability of your ad campaign. If left unchecked, your business could be bleeding money through advertising even if you get a lot of clicks.
The cost metric is also useful in calculating advanced Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
"Impressions" simply refer to the number of times users saw your ads in your advertising channels.
A high or growing number of impressions suggests that your targeting strategy is on point. However, it doesn't directly translate to profit.
Keep in mind that it's perfectly normal to have a high number of impressions and a low number of clicks. But if your impressions are consistently growing while your clicks barely move, it's a call to review your targeting strategy and ad copy for improvement opportunities.
The "clicks" metric is exactly what it says on the tin. It measures the number of users who actually clicked your ad and arrived at your landing page.
Keep in mind that clicks are directly tied to the effectiveness of your ad copy and targeting. Your success in converting clicks into sales, however, depends more on the user experience and optimization strategies on your landing page.
In advertising, clicks can potentially lead to conversions — the metric for tracking users who actually perform a desired action on your website.
Google Ads lets you define specific conversion types like purchases, downloads, sign-ups, and contacts. You can also create custom conversion actions that more accurately describe your ad campaign's objective.
Conversions help you gauge the impact of your advertising efforts on your bottom line. Even if certain conversion events may not have associated monetary values in them, they're still a good measure of the effectiveness of advertising in contributing to your business goals.
This metric measures the average amount you spent for each click you generated throughout your campaign. It's one of the most important metrics you should track if you want to maximize the profitability of your ads.
On a keyword level, CPC depends on a couple of factors, such as user intent, search volume, and competition. Generally, the more companies bidding on a keyword and the more conversion focused it is, the higher its CPC.
Your "cost per conversion" metric calculates the average amount you spend for each logged conversion in your campaign. It's denoted by "Cost / conv." in Google Ads' built-in reports.
Just like CPC, cost per conversion is useful in evaluating the cost-efficiency of your Google Ads campaign. More specifically, it lets you ensure you're not spending more money than you get from each conversion, which is how most advertising campaigns fail.
CTR gauges the likelihood of users clicking your ads after seeing them.
Using Google Ads' reporting tools, you don't need to calculate your ad campaign's CTR manually.
Remember that improving your Google Ads CTR is pivotal for ensuring the profitability of your advertising campaign. After all, your ads only matter if users actually click your ad and see what you have to offer on your landing page.
If you're wondering how many users actually become customers through your ads, you need to track your Google Ads conversion rate.
This metric quantifies the likelihood of users completing a conversion event on your website after arriving through your ad. Thankfully, Google Ads also tracks your campaign's conversion rate right off the bat.
Conversion rate is perhaps the most important metric for evaluating the success of your Google Ads campaign. And, in the marketing world, a conversion rate of anywhere between 2% and 5% is considered effective. Note: A high conversion rate doesn’t always ensure a profitable campaign, but a low conversion rate almost certainly means an unprofitable one.
Using some of the metrics above, you can calculate more advanced KPIs that give you a more complete picture of your ad campaign's performance.
ROAS is one such KPI. It measures the overall rate of return you get from your advertising spend.
To understand how ROAS is calculated, take a look at the formula below:
Suppose your revenue for an entire campaign is $20,000, whereas your total ad spend amounted to $5,000.
Plugging the values into the formula, you'll get the following ROAS:
In simple terms, the "view-through conversions" metric measures conversions from users who saw your ad but didn't take action immediately. To find this metric, go to the Google Ads report editor and create a 'Campaign performance' report.
You can set a specific view-through conversion window to control the maximum amount of time allowed for late conversions. For example, if your view-through conversion window is 30 days, a conversion will still be attributed to your campaign if the user completes a conversion action within a month of seeing your ad.
To make your Google Ads data work for you rather than against you, it's important to establish an efficient system for tracking your campaign metrics.
Sure, the built-in analytics features work fine. But if you also handle a lot of datasets from other business applications, you need to centralize your data management and analysis efforts into a single, robust source of truth.
That's where Polymer comes in.
Here's how you can track your most important Google Ads metrics with Polymer:
From the Polymer dashboard, fire up the data manager by clicking 'Manage Data' in the upper-right corner. From there, click 'Add New Data Source' and select 'Google Ads.'
Next, sign in to your Google account and grant Polymer the required access to your data. You then have to choose the Google Ads account and click 'Connect' to finish this step.
With your Google Ads data ready, click 'New Board' and choose between an auto-generated board or a blank page.
Picking an auto-generated board lets AI automatically select and generate the best visualizations to represent important insights from your dataset. This is extremely useful if you're pressed for time or don't have the luxury of an extensive background in data science.
For the sake of this guide, go with a blank board and select your Google Ads data source. Finally, click 'Create Board' to proceed to the next step.
In the dashboard editor, click 'Add' from the left menu to reveal Polymer's lineup of data visualization tools.
For Google Ads data, you'll most likely want scorecards for a clean and quick view of your metrics.
When configuring a scorecard, you pretty much only need to specify the KPI or metric you want to track. You can also play with a few extra features, like a goal value, caption, and date.
For the best results, enter a goal number for your scorecard to make your data more actionable. This will prompt Polymer to include a percentage bar — perfect for tracking how close you are to your advertising goals.
Tip: Be sure to select 'Lower is better' when creating scorecards for metrics that you need to reduce. Some possible examples are cost, CPC, and CAC.
After generating your scorecard, you're free to move it around, resize it, or use a different name. Structure your dashboard any way you want to make key results more visible to your data stakeholders.
Feel free to experiment with Polymer's other visualization tools for more creative ways to present your data. You can use the dashboard builder to create graphs, pie charts, heatmaps, scatter plots, pivot tables, and other visualization types without writing a single line of code.
For example, use a funnel chart to visually analyze the ratio between your campaign's impressions and conversions.
Again, you don't need to be a data scientist or write a single line of code to create this. It's even included in Polymer's pre-built Google Ads dashboard template.
Other visualization ideas include a monthly summary pivot table, a time series for clicks or impressions, or a bar graph for tracking your most profitable campaigns.
Chances are you're not the only one who needs access to your Google Ads performance data.
This is where Polymer's convenient reporting tools come in handy.
Your options include sharing access to your dashboard via a link or inserting it into your website via an embed code. From your Google Ads data dashboard, click 'Share Board' to view these options.
Another option is to turn your Google Ads dashboard into a presentation and share it with other stakeholders. This allows you to highlight explanations for each scorecard or data visualization.
Take note that Polymer automatically generates explanations using AI. You can easily edit this explanation to add more context, explain changes, provide predictions, or recommend actions.
To make the most out of Polymer for your Google Ads dashboard, take a look at these additional features:
Polymer is a game-changing tool if you want to use Google ad intelligence to boost your revenue.
Apart from the seamless data integration and drag-and-drop data visualization tools, Polymer's data manager also makes it easy to clean up your dataset — making sure no bad data gets added to the mix.
Click here to start a 7-day free trial and see how Polymer can enrich your Google Ads analytics efforts.
See for yourself how fast and easy it is to uncover profitable insights hidden in your data. Get started today, free for 7 days.
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