3 PPC Metrics to Completely Ignore (And 3 Metrics to Measure Instead)

Source: Neil Patel

PPC ads are the best way to grow your business right now.

Seriously, there’s nothing else out there like them.

Not even television ads generate new customers as quickly.

But they’re not perfect.

There are a few problems and issues.

AdWords and Facebook Ads can get incredibly complex.

For example, they report on dozens of metrics. How are you supposed to know which ones matter?

The sad truth is that many of them are completely irrelevant.

Some metrics might seem helpful at a glance. However, tracking them daily can ruin your results.

The good news is that you don’t have to be a prisoner to most PPC metrics.

There are a few simple ones out there to track obsessively. I’ll show you those by the end of this article.

First, though, you need to find out which metrics to avoid completely.

These metrics are useless.

And they’ll potentially cause you more harm than good.

So don’t even bother with these next three PPC metrics.

Ignore these three PPC metrics at your own risk

Let’s start the process of elimination.

You will know what to track only when you get rid of the unessential.

The metrics below are fine. But too often, they’re blown out of proportion.

You get side tracked into optimizing for them.

And then the important ones slip by underneath as a result.

Here are three PPC metrics to ignore.

Tip #1. Ignore the cost per engagement.

AdWords gives you a Cost Per Click (CPC).

People love this metric because it’s concrete. You know exactly what you’re getting in return for each dollar spent.

Compare that to your CPM, or cost per thousand impressions.

Cost per what?!

Exactly.

A CPM model is a bad idea for a few reasons. I’ll fully explain why in the next tip below. But the main problem is that you’re paying for eyeballs instead of performance.

Now think about Facebook for a second.

Social advertising channels started providing a CPE, or cost per engagement, to help provide concrete feedback.

They have CPM model, too. However, they wanted to give you a few other metrics to better reflect how people interact with social ads.

For example, an “engagement” on Facebook can be defined as a like, share, comment, or click.

Those are kind of beneficial, right?

Here’s the nuance to consider.

Engagements can be important. Driving engagements can help you can start creating custom audiences, for example.

You might track engagements at the top of your Facebook sales funnel.

Advertising on inexpensive video views is an excellent way to get audience engagements.

You get people to watch your video for a few pennies. And then Facebook’s custom audiences will help you run better, cheaper lead-gen campaigns.

However, your CPE by itself is useless in the grand scheme of things.

It doesn’t tell you anything about driving leads or customers. It’s not an actionable metric.

Instead, CPE is mostly for vanity.

It makes you feel good looking at it. Or it impresses your bosses in a meeting.

Otherwise, you can’t do anything to improve it. And it doesn’t help you change or tweak other campaigns to drive traffic and leads.

Strategically paying for engagements has its place. But measuring the cost per engagement shouldn’t be on your to-do list anytime soon.

Tip #2. Ignore your impressions.

Impressions tell you how many total times your ad has been viewed.

The first important thing to realize is that impressions are different than reach.

Impressions include total views. Reach is the number of unique people who view your ad.

In other words, 5,000 impressions don’t mean 5,000 people saw your ad. Maybe only half that number did.

CPM (cost per thousand impressions) is an AdWords bidding option.

But most people don’t use it today.

It’s typically only reserved for banner or display ads because it masks the true performance of your ads.

For example, why pay for 5,000 views when potentially none of them convert? That doesn’t even make sense.

AdWords and Facebook’s Cost Per Click (CPC) model would reveal this lie within seconds.

Impressions, therefore, have zero impact on your bottom line. They’re completely unrelated to the ultimate goal that you care about most.

Here’s an example to illustrate this point.

If your page only converts 1% of visitors, you’d need 1,000 clicks to get 10 customers.

Now, if your page converts 20% of visitors, you’d need only 50 clicks to get that same number of customers.

See where I’m going with this?

Impressions don’t tell you anything. They have literally zero bearing on those scenarios.

Let’s expand on this example for a second.

Say your AdWords clicks look something like this after the weekend:

Obviously, something happened between Thursday and Saturday. Your clicks started dropping like a rock.

Impressions alone don’t tell you anything, though. Neither do clicks by themselves.

That’s where the CTR can help.

CTR measures the percentage of people who see your ad and click on it.

Here’s what the math looks like for my formula friends:

Using CTR will help you quickly spot a red flag.

You can also see if there’s a logical reason for the drop. For example, maybe the decrease in clicks came down to a lower budget.

The CTR is a little off from the past few days. But there’s not a huge difference.

Impressions are way down on their own. However, the fact that you still see similar performance tells you that there’s nothing to worry about.

See what I mean here?

Watching irrelevant numbers like engagements or impressions like a hawk made you second-guess this campaign.

However, you can probably just chalk it up to routine fluctuations.

Results will tend to rise and fall a little bit. There’s no need to overreact.

You can ignore impressions entirely. Otherwise, keep CTR in the back of your mind just in case.

And focus on the metrics towards the end of this article.

Tip #3. Ignore your wasted ad spend.

“Wasted ad spend” isn’t an official advertising metric.

You won’t find it on AdWords or Facebook.

That’s why it can be dangerous.

Some PPC tools will use wasted ad spend as a way…

Click here to read more