Google provides endless metrics and calculations in their Ads platform. But which ones are the most important? When I start my day I look at these two.....
1) Cost Per Conversion
2) Cost (Budget Spent)
In most cases these 2 will be the most important for any organization regardless of your goals. These two answer my daily questions of "do we make any changes?" and "what changes do we make next?"
This is not intended to be a guide on how to launch and maximize your Google campaigns. The goal is to identify these 2 simple metrics that will lay the ground work for your campaigns. It will help determine how you should optimize your campaigns, how much you increase budgets and how much you allocate to marketing.
Cost Per Conversion
This is the THE metric when it comes any advertising that you do. Simply, how many results did you get for the money you spent.
If you're paid $10 in marketing and got 2 sales then your cost-per-conversion is $5 (Cost divided by results).
Why do I consider a simple calculation the most important metric? Because it lets you know your ROI (If you are marketing a product, service, etc that does not have a "return" on it then it will still dictate the success on your marketing spend).
Cost Per Conversion dictates how efficient your marketing is. Before you even look at your Cost Per Conversion you first need to determine what your goal is. Is it an arbitrary number that would leave you satisfied? Is it a number that guarantees you a certain profit margin? It doesn't matter the reason, but it does matter that you figure this out before you start spending.
You want your Cost Per Conversion to be equal or less than your target goal. So figure this out before you even launch and keep an eye to make sure your goal is being achieved.
Do the work and analyze your data before even spending the ad money.
How you continue to manage your campaign all comes down to this metric.
Cost / Spend
How much your campaign spends tells you if your target Cost Per Conversion will work in the Google ecosystem (when matched with your Cost Per Conversion).
In the perfect world your campaigns will have a Cost Per Conversion that equals your target AND your campaign have spent the maximum daily budget that you set.
The correlation of Spend and Budget is the real thing to keep an eye on. This answer will help determine what to do next when it comes to adjusting your campaign.
In my opinion this scenario is an example of an unsuccessful campaign.
Your target Cost Per Conversion is $1 and your budget is $200/day.
Your results are Cost Per Conversion is $0.95 and your send is only $15 dollars.
This is unsuccessful because you want to get 200 conversions per day but you only received $15 worth. While your Cost Per Conversion may be lower than what you set you're still not getting the volume you want.
Review
Independently Cost Per Conversion and Spend may not tell the real story of a campaign. BUT, when you combine them together they do two things:
1) Tell you the health of your campaign
2) Dictate what actions you take next.
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