4 Important Tips for Choosing PPC KPIs

When you were new to the business of paid search, you might have heard of colleagues or other workers mentioning KPIs here and there. People talk about how to meet it, but no one’s ever mentioned how to pick out KPIs for every PPC campaign objective. That’s why today, let’s talk about some tips for choosing PPC KPIs.

You often hear KPIs being discussed briefly when creating strategies, and on the other hand, tactics are more heavily prioritized. The opposite needs to be true. KPIs or key performance indicators must be driving tactics and not the other way around.

Choosing the right KPIs for any business helps drive strategy and assure the client or the boss that the campaign is going to head in the right direction, and will hit all the targets.

All About Key Performance Indicators

PPC KPIs are the next step after conducting a complete PPC audit. Most PPC providers define a KPI as a metric that you’ve identified as the most important. And that’s because they measure the true success of a campaign.

For this reason, PPC KPIs need to be tied to the goals of the campaign, and they should help you understand which actions you need to take in order to reach your goals.

For instance, let’s say the goal of my campaign is to get a high number of people to sign up for my webinar through a website form. That means my KPI needs to be a webinar sign-up conversion.

Knowing that, this begs the question: What makes PPC KPIs so important? Why do you need tips for choosing PPC KPIs?

Key performance indicators are closely aligned with the goal of a PPC campaign. As you go along, they are important because they help keep that goal in mind when you’re making decisions.

That’s why it’s so important to know what you want at the end of your campaign. What’s your objective?

You can also have secondary KPIs if your campaign needs. There’s no need to rely solely on tangible metrics like ROI and conversions. Just as there are secondary goals, there are also secondary KPIs that help ensure that you’re on the right path to success.

4 Tips for Choosing PPC KPIs

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When choosing KPIs, there are 4 tips used by professional digital marketing companies. They can be applied across various industries and campaign objectives.

1. Pick 1-2 KPIs: For each goal, make sure you choose 1-2 KPIs that can be used to measure the success of your goal. This is the part where setting SMART goals are very useful, because you’ve already gone through the process of choosing ways to measure your progress.
2. Understand the goals: Make sure you understand the goals of the campaign. Yes, your ultimate goal might be to drive more conversions and reduce CPA. But those aren’t the only goals that you need to focus on. For instance, you can keep track of capturing available search demands, monitor impression shares, and even how effective the ads are at click-through generation.
3. Define success: You can define what this means to your business or your client. In addition, you can also use previous performance or industry level benchmarks to keep track of your success.
4. Monitor the KPIs: Closely keep track of this and re-evaluate if the chosen KPIs still match the goals or any recent change in the industry.

And on that note,

KPIs you pick are largely influenced by your client’s business models and the industry where you’re doing PPC campaigns for. It’s good to consider industry standard KPIs, but it’s more important to prioritize KPIs that are relevant to your specific company and the goals that you’ll be working towards.

• Make sure KPIs accurately measure progress towards company goals.
• Less is more. 1-2 KPIs are enough.
• Think about the company’s stage of growth.
• Identify leading and lagging key performance indicators.
• Choose KPIs that are more relevant to your company and your situation.