Google Ads—Understanding Impressions, Clicks and Leads

Measuring the effectiveness of your Google Ads campaign will improve ad quality and help you find your ideal bookkeeping clients.

In our previous blog we talked about how Google Ads can help you to reach more potential clients for your Xero bookkeeping business. We decided on a budget, designed an ad, built a website landing page, and created a strong call to action (CTA).

Google Ads Training Course Campaign Scenario: Your Google ad has now been up and running for two weeks and you’ve had a couple of enquiries, but no solid leads yet. What tools and metrics can you use to evaluate the quality of your ad, make improvements and ensure that you are getting a BETTER return on your ad spend?

The key to improving your Google Ads performance is to understand the difference between Impressions, Clicks, and Leads. Knowing how they work will help you to improve the quality of your ads and your landing page, helping you to attain a higher Ad Rank and attract more of your ideal clients.

Ad Rank

Ad Rank determines where your ads are shown in relation to other ads (or even if they are shown at all.) Your score is recalculated each time you compete in an auction. The ads with the highest Ad Rank scores will show at the top of the search results.

Factors that contribute to your Ad Rank include:

Your bid. How much you’re willing to pay for each click on your ad.
The quality of your ads and landing page. Google checks the relevance and usefulness of the links in your ad and also the website that it links to. They do this by calculating the expected click-through rate (CTR) and by measuring your ad’s relevance to the search terms (keywords) that were entered.
Competitor ads. The ad with the highest Ad Rank score will be more likely to win at auction.
Context. Google checks the search terms that are entered by a person, their location and the type of device they are using, and compares it to other search results that are displayed.

In addition to rewarding good quality ads with a higher PageRank, Google Ads will also reduce the cost per click (CPC), leading to lower advertising costs.

Impressions

The number of impressions is the number of times your ad was actually shown to people.

An impression doesn’t necessarily mean that anybody paid any attention to your ad, only that it appeared on their screen.

The number of impressions your Google Ad receives will increase as your Ad Rank score improves.

The higher your ranking in the search results, the more chances you have of getting Clicks on your ad. It’s important to put something in your Google Ad that makes them want to Click on it and I’ve written about Call To Action’s in previous posts.

Clicks & Click Through Rate (CTR)

Clicks are the number of times people clicked on your Google Ad.

Clickthrough rate is the percentage of impressions that led to a click.
For example, if your ad got 100 impressions and 10 clicks, then your CTR is 10%.

Clicks and CTR are the most important metrics to watch because they are what gets traffic to your website. The quality of your ad and how it compares to other competitor ads will determine whether or not somebody clicks on it. This is why it is important to include:

Your Unique Selling Point (USP), for example, ‘payroll specialist’ or ‘30 years experience working with small businesses.’
An attractive offer such as a discount code or a free sample.
A strong call to action (CTA), for example, ‘Click here to get your free download.’

Leads

Leads (or conversions) are clicks that are converted into actions, such as a phone call, a webchat or an opt-in form submission.

Your conversion rate is the percentage of leads you got out of all the clicks you had on your ad.

The number of leads you receive is not only an indicator of how well your ad is working, but how good your website is at capturing and maintaining the attention of prospective clients.

Check the Google Analytics data for your website landing page.

This is where you can find out the percentage of visitors to your website that navigated away from your site after viewing only one page (bounce rate), which pages they visited on your site, how long they spent there and which links they clicked on.

If your bounce rate is high (e.g. 80%) or no further action was taken (no link clicks or visits to other pages), there might be something about that page that was off-putting.

This is why it is critical to have a landing page that is interesting, easy to navigate and delivers what your ad promises.

Having a CRM installed to capture and manage your incoming leads will ensure that you respond promptly and professionally. With the right integrations in place you’ll be able to save time and money by automatically capturing client data from website forms, making outbound phone calls, and sending emails and SMS messages.

Summary

Learn how to use Google Ads to get more leads and customers. Google Ads Training Course and Certificate

By reviewing the performance of your Google ads and website analytics you’ll gain valuable insights into which ads are resonating with your ideal clients, and which ads need further refining and testing.

Your goal should be to keep iterating and updating your entire Google Ad to Lead experience to ensure you have the best Google Ad Rank.

Keep an eye on your competitors and find out which ads are ranking highest in related Google searches.
Test your ad changes with only one or two modifications at a time. If you change too many things at once you won’t know which ones made a difference. You could use a new Google Ad Group to help keep track of these changes
Record your results in a spreadsheet each month for easier comparison of results.
Ask new clients for feedback about why they responded to your ad.

As you continue to refine your ads, you will soon find the right combination that sets you apart from other bookkeepers and captures the interest of your ideal client.