Digital Marketing Metrics 

Much of the time, you will want to start with an allocated budget. This may be tweaked as you calculate the cost per customer, but in starting with this metric you will get the best idea of ​​what your return on investment will be.

Impressions

Number of Clicks

Click-Through-Rate

Cost-per-Click

Number of Leads

Cost-per-Lead

Number of Customers Gained

Cost-per-Customer

Burdened Hourly Cost

Final Customer Acquisition Cost

If you're calculating cost based on a running campaign, take a look at the impressions you're gaining through your ads. If you're estimating, use previous ad data or research industry or payment amount averages. You may want to use your Google Webmaster tool as a base-level parameter for the specific keywords you're targeting as well.

The number of clicks you get on an ad is very important. This will be the determining factor for your click-through-rate, cost-per-click, number of leads, and ultimately your customer acquisition cost. If an ad is not getting clicks, you may want to consider tweaking the copy or targeting different terms. You may be competing with a high authority on the same terms, and therefore aren't appearing in the first page of results.

Spend a good portion of your time running through this statistic and working towards improvement. Ultimately, It is the leading factor for making or breaking your ROI on PPC.

Your click-through-rate will compare the number of clicks received by the number of impressions.

# of Clicks / # of Impressions = CTR

It's important to track your click-through-rate because it will help to determine whether your ad copy or design is effective and clear. It's safe to assume that if your CTR is really low that your copy may not be relevant for the search term that is driving impressions. On the other hand, if your CTR is very high, you may want to replicate your tone or design elsewhere or invest a larger monthly budget to benefit from these results.

Many PPC platforms will report on your cost per click. If this data is unavailable, determine your cost-per-click by dividing the number of clicks received by the allocated budget.

# of Clicks / Allocated Budget = CPC

Taking a look at your CPC may reveal a few things. For example, if your cost per click is very high, you may be utilizing keywords within your ad that are very competitive. It may also mean that you're not getting enough clicks for the amount you're budgeting. If you'd like to lower the cost of a click, you may want to find lower competition terms, remove terms that are driving high bounce rates or lower your bid amount.

Assuming your PPC landing page includes a form that will capture a lead conversion, the number of leads will be determined by your visit-to-lead conversion rate (or the number of leads procured if your campaign is active).

# of Clicks X Visit-to-Lead Conversion Rate = # of Leads

In this case, a Lead is essentially someone who has said, "Yes, I am interested in a portion of your business." These are ultimately the prospects who you'll be focusing on in order to make a sale. As with any marketing tactic, tracking the number of leads captured from a PPC campaign is very important, because it will help you determine whether or not pay-per-click is an effective method of acquisition for your company.

To map out your CPL, divide your allocated budget by the number of leads gained.

Allocated Budget / # of Leads = CPL

This number to remain as low as possible. Since a lead is not a guaranteed sale, if you're not converting on leads, this will just be wasted money. It's good to be cognizant of your CPL and continually assess whether or not the price is worth the return.

Similar to the number of leads gained, you will calculate the number of customers gained using your average lead-to-customer conversion rate or use your active campaign data.

# of Leads X Lead-to-Customer Conversion Rate = # of Customers

Whether or not the numbers of customers gained through PPC is good or not depends on the value of a customer. For example, you may have only received one customer, but if they're shelling out thousands of dollars, this may be worth the spend. The number of customers will be important for your business, but is not necessarily the most accurate number to report on. Instead, you'll want to focus more on the cost-per-customer, as described next.

Now it's time to get to the nitty gritty. The result of this question may prove or disprove the value of PPC for your company. If the cost is higher than the amount made from a single customer, it may not be worth the spend.

To calculate your cost-per-customer, you'll want to divide the allocated budget by the number of customers earned. Allocated Budget / # of Customers = Cost-Per-Custome By this point, the cost-per-customer will show (based only on the actual budget) what you've spent in order to earn that customer. However, this is not including the time you've spent to create or track your PPC campaigns or the paid too

Yandex surpasses Google.ru at PPC clickthrough rates

In the last couple of months I have been spending a good amount of time with Russian PPC campaigns, both in Google.ru and Yandex. Even though I personally prefer Google’s interface, as it much more user -friendly and convenient, Yandex delivers more traffic and at a good cost.

Yandex.Direct provides some interesting features that automate parts of optimization tasks, such as, for example, “Autobroker” for automatic CPC management and “Autofocus” for automatic keyword refinement. Unlike most Google’s PPC automation tools, these two are actually quite useful.

The recent study conducted by Neiron.ru also showed that Yandex PPC ads have significantly better CTR comparing to Russian AdWords :

Yandex

Google.ru

To come up with these numbers Neiron.ru analyzed 5 896 473 search result pages in Yandex and 2 199 835 in Google.ru.

According to the study, ads in premium (top 3) positions receive 75,7% of all clicks on PPC ads in Yandex and 91,1% in Google.ru. 9 ads in Yandex’s right column get to share the remaining 24,3%. Google’s 8 ads on the right receive 8,9% of clicks.

Last week Yandex announced that machine learning technology MatrixNet, powering their organic search, was applied to Yandex.Direct as well.

CTR of Yandex.Direct ads increased by astonishing 20% during the first week after implementation of MatrixNet. Quite an improvement, isn’t it?

Yandex launches a desktop application for managing PPC campaings

Yandex.Direct, the PPC platform of Yandex, has been around since 2001 and is the oldest system of contextual ads in Russia (Google launched AdWords in Russia in 2002). Even though it displays ads to over 22 million people every day and attracts hundreds of new advertizers from Russia and overseas, the user interface is, let’s say, not the most convenient. Managing large PPC campaigns through Yandex web interface is a challenging task. But from now on it will be much easier for all search marketers. Finally Yandex launched a desktop tool for managing Yandex.Direct accounts, similar to those of Google, Bing and Yahoo!. Please meet  Direct Commander!

The tool is available for Windows and Mac, but unfortunately the user interface is in Russia only. The first version of Commander is not as powerful as AdWords Editor, but it provides all the basic options you need for day-to-day PPC optimization. With the help of Direct Commander you can easily:

- Change campaign and ad settings (targeting, budgets, alerts, site exclusion, automated campaign management features such as Autofocus etc.)

- View statistics

- Create, edit and manage ads

- Add, remove and modify keywords

- Manage your presence in Yandex Catalog

- Import data from XLS and CSV files

The interface is very convenient, in my personal opinion. Commander window is divided into 3 panels

1. Campaigns

2. Ads

3. Keywords

The panels can be minimized if needed. I really like the fact that you don’t need to switch between tabs, but can edit the campaign at all levels simultaneously.

Direct Commander window

Of course, since it is the first version, there are a lot of functions that are missing. For example, it is impossible to download campaigns into Excel. Would be also nice to have the Yandex keyword tool (Wordstat) incorporated into the tool.

I am looking forward to more features in Direct Commander, but it’s already a big improvement. The tool is going to be great help to all search engine marketers optimizing for Yandex.

Dynamic Search Ads

Dynamic Search Ads look like other text ads that you see on Google search results pages. But in fact they’re a new way to target searches with relevant ads that link to the most appropriate landing page, all based on the content of your website. You don’t have to choose keywords, tell Google when you add a page to your website or take it down, or create an ad for each product page of your site. AdWords figures out when to show your ads based on the same indexing and relevance technologies used for Google's organic search.
How it works

AdWords uses content from your website domain to target your ads for searches


instead of keywords.


You can tell AdWords whether all pages or just specific sections should be used to target your ads by creating dynamic ad targets. Dynamic ad targets can be your whole website or specific sections of the following:
pages that belong to specific categories
pages that contain certain words
pages whose titles contain certain words
pages whose URLs contain certain strings

Using Google’s organic search index of your website, AdWords determines which searches might be relevant to the products and services offered on this website. When AdWords finds searches that are a match for your dynamic ad targets it generates a text ad in real time that links to the most appropriate page from your website. The headline is dynamically put together by taking words from the search phrase and content from the landing page used in the ad. The rest of the ad is a template that you wrote when you set up or edited your campaign.


Although Dynamic Search Ads change the way that ads are targeted for searches, they won’t impact the way that ads get ranked, the performance of your keyword-based ads, or the amount of control you have over your account.
Same ranking. When entering the auction, the ranking of a dynamic search ad is determined in the same way as keyword-based ads: the maximum cost-per-click bid that you’ve specified for the dynamic ad target and the dynamic search ad’s Quality Score using the same calculations that are used with other search ads. The cost for a click is based on your ad’s Quality Score and the AdRank of the ad just below yours, again, just like with other search ads.
Works with your keyword-based campaigns. Complementary instead of competitive, Dynamic Search Ads don’t trump keyword-based ads. Dynamic Search Ads only show when keyword-based ads for your domain aren’t eligible to run in the auction. And the performance of your Dynamic Search Ads won’t influence your keyword-based ads and vice-versa since AdWords handles the history of your Dynamic Search Ads separately from your other ads.
You’re still in control. With Dynamic Search Ads, you control the dynamic ad targets, ad templates, bids, and your budget. You can use negative keywords, like "free" or "returns," just like with traditional campaigns to avoid showing your ads on searches that don't convert into sales. And you can prevent advertising when specific words or phrases appear on the page, like "temporarily out of stock" or "sold out", when you add dynamic ad targets that exclude pages containing these words. You'll also get full reporting: see the headlines and landing pages of your ads, the ad generated, average CTR and CPC, and conversion data.
Who should use Dynamic Search Ads

You’ll probably get the most value from Dynamic Search Ads if you operate a website with hundreds or thousands of products, services, and listings that frequently change. Do you currently map keywords, bids, and ad text to each product listing on your website? Dynamic Search Ads can help you get more complete ad exposure for more of what you sell, while reducing the effort of keeping your ads, keywords, and destination URLs current.

Position Preference in Adwords

                                                                                           

Position preference is a feature in Adwords that allows advertisers to request that their ads are shown in a specified position for any given keyword. It is important to note that with position preference turned on, Google cannot guarantee that your ad will be shown in the preferred position 100% of the time.

Optimizing Your Keyword Ranks With Position Preference
Conversion rates can vary drastically across keyword rankings. By using the position preference option, advertisers that have identified a preferred (higher converting or more efficient) rank can set a preferential ranking in Google.

For example: if your product or service does not tend to generate an immediate conversion response, you may find that the #1 & #2 positions generate a high number of click-throughs but a relatively low number of conversions. This will undoubtedly lead to an increase in CPA. In this instance the advertiser may consider setting a position preference of (3 - 5). These settings would send a request for an ad-ranking (3-5) assuming that the ad meets auction requirements for those positions.

The key to effectively utilizing position preference lies in the advertiser’s ability to cross-reference conversion data. This can be achieved by either setting up Adwords Conversion Tracker, Google Analytics or a third party analytics solution. In the early stages of testing, advertisers should monitor their performance as it pertains to their original ad rankings. This should act as a benchmark, followed by testing ads at different ranking ranges.

How to Enable Position Preference
1. Login to your Adwords account.
2. On the Campaign Summary page, select the box to the left of any campaigns you want to enable for position preference.
3. Click Edit Settings.
4. Find the Networks and bidding section.
5. Under Options, select the box next to 'Position preferences.'
6. Click Save Changes.

What Are The Position Preference Options?
There is a wide range of position preference options in Adwords.
- Higher than a given position (such as above 7)
- Lower than a given position (such as below 4)
- Within a range of positions (such as from 2 - 8)
- In a single exact position (such as position 2)

Does Position Preference Always Work?
The short answer is no, the top limit cannot be guaranteed, "...if there are 10 people with position preference turned on, and their top position is all 4, then if Google followed that ad serving plan, there would be 0 ads as no one wanted the top 3 spots. The bottom limit of position preference is a hard limit - the upper limit might not be."

While this example is an extreme case, it highlights the point that position preference allows advertisers to set a preferred position and that said position cannot be guaranteed.