Tips For Tracking Your Google Ads Performance Over Time

Increasing the number of clicks to your website is a good thing, right? More clicks mean more people are seeing your information, so you must be doing something right. While clicks are important, measuring clicks alone cannot be the sole measure of whether you have a successful Google Ads campaign.

What matters the most when it comes to clicks is the quality of the clicks – not the quantity. If you have a localized business, such as an orthodontist’s office, you want to be sure the clicks you are getting are from your service area, and not hundreds of miles away. The ultimate goal of your ad campaign should be to convert visitors to your site into clients or patients, and if you have a large number of clicks coming from the other side of the country, these clicks are irrelevant to you.

Quick Tip: To know if the clicks you are getting are actually valuable to you, check the following:

• Where are the clicks originating from?
• Are the clicks coming from relevant search terms?
• Are the clicks converting?

Time Periods Comparisons (Year over Year, Month over Month)

Just comparing a month from the current year with a month from a previous year may not be a good indication of the success of your campaigns, either. This is because competition changes year after year – new players come in and change the auction; and Google makes changes to how the AdWords process works throughout the year. That means the process may be different this June than it was last June, so you may not be able to accurately compare your results.

If you look at top bidders in one month of this year compared to the same month last year, you will probably notice new bidders. Some may be larger players that have larger budgets to compete with you. For instance, if you are an orthodontist, you may notice that direct-to-consumer company Smile Direct Club is popping up everywhere. Because they are direct-to-consumer, they are competing with local orthodontists throughout the country, making one more hurdle for local orthodontists to jump over.

When comparing month to month, you also have to understand if there are typically ebbs and flows in your business based on the time of year. For instance, are summer months typically slower because people are traveling on vacation, rather than scheduling orthodontist appointments? If that is the case, comparing ad performance from July with performance from September may not be an accurate comparison.

When looking at the number of clicks your ad has received, you have to look at all of the data and not just the overall number. That means looking at information such as where the click generated from. You want every click on your website to be a potential new client or patient, so that means you need to ensure your clicks are coming from locations that could ensure that. For instance, if you are a dentist or orthodontist, your clicks should be within the 10-mile radius of your office.

But then, you need to see how people are finding your ad. And that means understanding what search they used that brought your ad up. In your Google AdWords analytics, you can see all the search queries that triggered your ads to display. Using this information, you can better understand what search terms or keywords people are using, as well as look for the negative keywords that are bringing irrelevant traffic to your site. You should be regularly monitoring your keywords and search terms to ensure they are optimized to allow for relevant, high quality clicks.

Some Instances of Irrelevant Clicks You Can Avoid:

• Clicks from services and products you don’t provide but Google shows your ads for them because the target keywords might be very close.
• Clicks from the business names of your competitors. You might want to add your competitors names as your negative keywords unless you want to deliberately target your competitors’ branded terms. This is less of a case for local businesses such as dentists and orthodontists but more relevant for national advertisers with bigger budgets.
• Clicks from your own business name. You most probably rank number one for your branded terms, organically advertising for your branded terms can just result in getting clicks from existing customers or those that could simply find you from organic results. This can be a waste of your monthly budget, especially when you have a very limited budget. Again, this might be different for bigger advertisers, especially when they are under attack by their competitors targeting their branded terms.

It is important to note when you have made an adjustment to your ads in order to see how that adjustment may affect your performance from that point on. For instance, if you made an increase to your budget, your ads could start performing better simply because they are being seen more often. Or, if you have added negative keywords to help filter out irrelevant clicks, this is important to note so that you can see if that helps the efficacy of your ads. Additionally, you may have made changes to your landing pages over time that can affect the efficacy of your ads. Google Ads change history is a great tool to help you keep track of all the changes that have been made to your account through you or others. Also, you might have added a new conversion tracking method that you didn’t have before; this can make the comparison a bit more challenging.

Quick Tip: As your ads or landing pages become more track-able with click-to-calls, call tracking, forms tracking, live chat tracking and etc. you would be able to better gauge and monitor the performance of your Google Ads campaign.

When attempting to compare your ad performance over time, these factors are all important to take into consideration. To help you get the most from your ads and turn clicks into customers, call Nexunom today at 844-SEO-FOXY. Our PPC management services can help you build an effective campaign that increases your client or patient load.