The marketing world is filled with jargon. There are an incredible amount of words that are used that those outside of the industry have no idea what they mean. This becomes markedly more confusing when a marketer is trying to explain the performance of someone’s account, and the client isn’t too sure what the terms mean, or what the value of the terms are.

All of a sudden, conversions become confusing, impressions much less impressive. If you’re lost in a world of weirdly worded metrics then this blog will shed some light on the strange terms used to understand the performance of your Adwords account.

Impressions

Quite simply, impressions refer to the amount of times your ad has been seen. If you ad has been placed on a website or search engine results page and a user has seen the ad this will count as an impression.

Clicks

An easy one – the total number of times people have actually clicked on your ad!

Click through rate

This is the ratio of impressions to clicks – those who have seen the ad and clicked through. The percentages you see can all vary – depending on which keywords you use and your ads, the percentage can be very high or quite low. Even if you see your account has a click through rate of 0.1%, this might be well above average for your industry and campaign type.

To better understand if your click through rate is good, this infographic will help you. 

Average cost per click

Another easy one – how much you’re paying on average for your clicks. Despite setting a maximum amount you are happy to pay for a click on each keyword, how much you will actually pay will depend on how you rank within the Adwords auction.

Average position

Average position refers to where your ad shows on the results page – with 1 being at the top of the page, and the higher numbers being at the bottom of the page, or even on the 2nd or 3rd results page. There are a maximum of 4 positions available at the top of the page for advertisers, so if you’re scoring above a 4, you might be limiting the amount of exposure that your advert is getting as people will have to scroll down to see it. You can usually raise your position by upping the bid of the ad or keywords in question by 5 or 10p.

Conversions

Conversions are quite multi-faceted. Conversions can refer to multiple different actions a user takes on your site after clicking an ad. If you’re in the B2C industry, these will probably refer to sales. If you’re B2B, these could take the form of leads or also sales. Ultimately, you decide what conversions are by tracking what you want to track.

Cost per conversion

Yet another that is pretty self explanatory – how much you’re paying for each conversion on average.

View-through conversions

A little bit trickier. View-through conversions are conversions where a user has not clicked on your ad, but has seen it and then later gone to your site organically and made a conversion. These can skew your cost per conversion a little bit, so to work out your true cost per conversion, add up your view through conversions and your actual conversions, and divide by your overall cost.

Where there are hundreds of strange metrics available on Adwords, these are the run-of-the-mill every day metrics that are used by us for all of our clients to better understand the success of the campaigns we are running. So if you’re new to Adwords or just want to be aware of the key metrics, then this blog will have decoded all you need to know.
If there’s any further information you require on Adwords metrics – or regarding your account more generally – don’t hesitate to get in touch with us for a chat and we’ll be happy to help!