Recently there has been talk of a new metric within the PPC industry: conversions per impression. I first read about this metric from Chris Crompton of Search Engine Land.

In my view, this metric represents the overall effectiveness of your PPC campaign. The click-through rate (CTR) measures how relevant your ads are to user search queries. The conversion rate tells you the percentage of visitors who complete your predefined goals once the ads are clicked. These are important metrics, but it may be time to consider conversions per impression (CPI) as well. Let’s take this example:

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In my experience managing pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, a frequently overlooked topic is the landing page.  Once your users click your ad, where are they going to go?  Setting up a structurally sound campaign is imperative, but it is only half the equation.  The user needs to land on a page that continues the messaging and call to action that is used in the ad.

Several factors go into creating a good landing page, none of which should be ignored.  These techniques will determine how many of your clicks turn into conversions.  Conversion rate, as I have previously written about, is a tier one success indicator of how well your campaign is doing.  Give your users an effective landing page, and you should see your conversion rates increase.

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ROI, CPA, CTR, CPC…these are all metrics that you can use to evaluate your pay-per-click (PPC) campaign.  The amount of data available to you can be overwhelming (so can the acronyms, defined below).  The challenge is determining which of these are true key performance indicators (KPIs) and why they matter.

A three tier structure organizes PPC campaign metrics by level of importance.  Tier One metrics represent the most critical data, while Tier Two and Tier Three metrics do not demand as much attention.  It’s not that certain metrics are irrelevant.  All of these metrics should be analyzed and acted upon in order to improve your PPC campaign success. However, a three tier structure places PPC metrics in order of how well they reflect the success of your PPC campaign.

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