Most common paid media questions

Pay-per-click — or PPC advertising — is the most common form of paid search. Using a PPC campaign means companies don’t pay anything until someone clicks on their ad. This makes it an affordable way to advertise and ensures your ads reach users who are actively searching for your company’s services.

General Advertising Questions

What is PPC?

Pay-per-click is an internet advertising model used to drive traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays a publisher when the ad is clicked. Pay-per-click is usually associated with first-tier search engines.

What is CPM?

Cost per mille, also called cost per thousand, is a commonly-used measurement in advertising. It is the cost an advertiser pays for one thousand views or impressions of an advertisement.

What is CTR?

Click-through rate is the ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who view a page, email, or advertisement. It is commonly used to measure the success of an online advertising campaign for a particular website, as well as the effectiveness of email campaigns.

What is CVR

CVR stands for conversion rate or conversion ratio. Conversions can happen when a customer completes a task, makes a purchase, subscribes to a service or does any other action that the company counts as a conversion.

What is CAC?

Customer Acquisition Cost is the cost of winning a customer to purchase a product or service. As an important unit economic, customer acquisition costs are often related to customer lifetime value. With CAC, any company can gauge how much they’re spending on acquiring each customer.

What is ROAS

Return on ad spend (ROAS) is an important key performance indicator (KPI) in online and mobile marketing. It refers to the amount of revenue that is earned for every dollar spent on a campaign.

Always Depends Advertising Questions

How many Facebook ads per Adset?

Within each campaign, ideally, you want to have 3 to 5 ad sets. But more importantly, each ad set should have only one ad in it.

Though if you’ve been assigned a Facebook Account Manager, you can create and manage more ads. You can have up to 50 ads in each ad set. You can have up to 10,000 ad sets. You can have up to 10,000 campaigns.

How many Google ads per Adgroup?

You never know what message might resonate best with potential customers. Because of this, we recommend having at least 3 ads in each ad group and using optimized ad rotation.

How many pMax Campaigns do I make?

Google recommends 50-100 conversion per pMax campaign per month, but it could also work with 20-30 / month. Rule of thumb is the less conversions you have, the less campaigns you should have.

What bidding strategy do I use?

Google Ads offers several bid strategies that are tailored to different types of campaigns. Depending on which networks your campaign is targeting, and whether you want to focus on getting clicks, impressions, conversions, or views you can determine which strategy is best for you. In this article, we’ll describe how to use your advertising goals to choose your bid strategy.

What Meta Ads/Facbook Objective do I use?

Before you choose which ad to create with Meta Ads Manager, first consider what your business goals are. Your advertising objective is the outcome you and your business would find the most valuable. It’s important to know what you want to achieve in order to choose the right objective.

As your business grows, your campaign goals may change.

What are the top metrics to measure PPC success?

1. Quality score

2. Impressions

3. Click-through rate (CTR)

4. Click share

5. Impression share (%)

6. Conversion rate (%)

7. Source and conversion tracking

8. Cost per click (CPC)

9. Cost per acquisition (CPA)

10. Revenue on ad spend (ROAS)

The What and Why Behind Key PPC Metrics

Cost per acquisition (CPA)

Why should you measure CPA?

CPA is one of the most important metrics for marketers, as it helps measure overall ROI for ad campaigns across digital channels. It creates a direct link between business revenue and advertising efforts.

What do we recommend?

Track month-over-month change in CPA. If CPA changes by 5% or more, you should take action to lower total costs or increase conversions. Start by adjusting your bids or targeting different keywords.

Revenue on ad spend (ROAS)

Why should you measure ROAS?

Why should you measure ROAS?

ROAS is a measure of PPC campaign performance in monetary terms. The higher the ROAS, the better your PPC campaign is at generating top-line revenue for your business.

What do we recommend?

To improve ROAS, segment your campaigns to deliver relevant messaging in paid campaigns and target higher-value accounts.

Cost per click (CPC)

Why should you measure CPC?

CPC is a performance metric that demonstrates the overall value of your PPC campaign. It tells if you are paying too much for leads compared to the revenue you are generating in return. A high CPC could indicate wasted ad spend, as not enough visitors who are clicking through are converting into leads.

What do we recommend?

To lower your CPC, improve your quality score, try using a different marketing channel, adjust your bids or pause lower-value ads (i.e., ads that aren’t garnering as much audience interest as you would like).

Source and conversion tracking

Three common ways to track sources and conversions:

  •  UTM tags. Add these snippets of code at the end of URLs to track information about your visitors, including the source, medium and campaign that brought them to your site.
  • Pixel tags. Add pixel images to webpages to gather data on how users navigate your content and track user activity on ad campaigns.
  • Automated conversion tracking. Enable the automated conversion tracking option offered by most paid advertising channels to automatically adjust your bids, get optimization suggestions and target users better. 
Click-through rate (CTR)

Why should you measure CTR?

A good CTR is a strong indicator that your ad is being well received, its messaging is clear and users find the calls to action (CTAs) relevant. A high CTR also directly contributes to your quality score. 

While CTR is a great traffic metric, it may not necessarily mean the conversion of a lead into a prospect or customer, as it doesn’t track what happens to users after they click on the ad.

What do we recommend?

If your impressions are high but CTR is low, improve your ad by A/B testing the ad copy and design elements. Additionally, you can personalize messaging for target demographics by segmenting by industry, firm size and region. 

Quality score

Why should you measure quality score?

A low score indicates that you may need to make changes to your ads, keywords, or landing page; else, your campaign could be wasting significant ad spend. 

What do we recommend?

At Gartner Digital Markets, we recommend having a complete and healthy profile customized to the products. To do that, collect relevant and recent user reviews, ensure your ad message and landing page are appealing and clear for your target audience, and use a mix of keywords (high volume-low competition, broad match, long-tail, geotargeted, etc).