How to know if ads are running and performing well?
There are several key things you’ll want to monitor to evaluate how well your campaign is performing:
- Whether or not your ads are running
- Amount of traffic your ads are receiving
- How this traffic is converting into meaningful actions like sales or sign ups.
Ad status
To check if your ads are showing, run a keyword diagnosis in your account. On your account’s Keywords tab, hover over the speech bubble icon next to the status for any keyword to see a help bubble appear with information about your keyword. You can also use the ‘Diagnose keywords’ option in the “More Actions” menu to diagnose multiple keywords at once and set parameters for the diagnosis.
You can also review your account statistics to see if your ads have received clicks or impressions (ad views). Note that account reporting is not in real time, so it may take up to three hours for your statistics to show.
Measures of success
- Clickthrough rate: To get an immediate idea of how well a campaign is doing, check the clickthrough rate (CTR) — how often people click your ad after seeing it. As a rule of thumb, a CTR under 1% indicates that your ads are not targeted to a relevant audience. If you find that your CTR is low, take a look at our optimization guide to get tips.
- Keyword status: Our system helps you monitor your results by automatically evaluating your keyword performance and letting you know the status of each of your keywords. An “Eligible” status means your keyword is eligible to trigger ads.
- First page bids: Another way to evaluate the effectiveness of a keyword-targeted campaign is to check your keywords’ first page bid estimates. Low bid estimates typically indicate that your ads are performing well, while high bid estimates can indicate that your ads are not as relevant as they could be after optimization.
- ROI: Return on investment (known as ROI) is the ratio of your costs to your profits. It shows whether your advertising charges are more or less than the profit your business made as a result of your ads. To measure your advertising ROI, you’ll need to get data from tools like our free conversion tracking tool or Google Analytics.
Basic tools
- Ad Preview and Diagnosis: Use this tool to view your ads as they would appear on a regular Google search results page, without accruing extra impressions.
- Conversion tracking: The most effective way to track your results is to implement AdWords conversion tracking. This is an easy way to see precisely which clicks (and which keywords) are leading to sales or to other desirable actions.