There’s day’s where I feel like I spend my entire day switching between our analytics program and excel looking to achieve optimum ROAS for our paid search campaigns. After a while, numbers seem to just run together so I thought it might be useful to put some of the metrics that I use daily in a list and how I get those final numbers.

For some of our accounts we optimize based off sales but these metrics are going to be based off page views and CPM based advertising.

Impressions – The number of times a pay per click ad was displayed to a potential site visitor.

Clicks – The number of visitors that clicked on a paid search ad.

Click Through Rate (CTR) – The percentage of impressions/clicks.

Page Views – The number of page views viewed by paid search visitors. Note: With the use of ajax etc you’ll want to make sure your tracking not only page views but interactions as well.

Page Views Per Click – The average number of page views/click.

Pre-Rolls – Many sites are running video so its important to track the number of pre-rolls, post-rolls etc..

Pre-Rolls Per Click – Total Pre-Rolls/Clicks.

Cost – The amount spent on paid search

CPC – The average cost per click. Take cost/clicks.

Cost Per Page View – Take your cost/page views

Revenue Per Page View – When your revenue is based on page views, you simply take your revenue and divide by total page views.

Revenue – Once you know your page view value you can determine your revenue. An example would be (Page Views * CPM)/1000. Here you can also include video plays or other metrics which have a value tied back such as sign-ups or entries.

ROAS – Your return on ad spend is simply your Revenue/Cost (It’s more involved when determining ROAS on purchases)

Will you be in Seattle between June 2-5th this year? If so I will be. In the past I’ve attended the SES (Search Engine Strategies) conferences and while I’ve enjoyed myself, learned some cool things and met a lot of great people, I’m really looking forward to Danny’s SMX Conference. Not to dawg on SES but I really feel like I’ve outgrown it in terms of the sessions. During the last one in Chicago well over half the audience was new to search and was attending their first search conference. I think its great for people who are new to the industry, but when it comes to the sessions SES just doesn’t seem to be for me at this time. Thats the biggest reason why I’m looking forward to SMX Advanced. From what I’ve read it seems to be a smaller group with a lot more advanced tracks and it happens to be in Seattle where I’ve never been. I’m looking forward to being there and if your going to be attending let me know and perhaps we can meet up.

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Last week I received an email through my contact form about buying links. They referred to it as buying ad space but then asked to buy text links from my homepage, preferably in text and asked for a yearly rate. The company is actually legit, well as legit as you can be when buying links like this but what I really found disturbing is that from the companies homepage (its an “SEO” company) they have a section that is entitled “Paid Link Services” 100% Manual Link Buying. Any chance that the 28 links on their homepage to “recommended sites” are all paid links and they are their clients? I’m guessing those sites aren’t getting much value since the SEO site’s PR is a 0. I’ll just stick with my $1.00 a week from adsense for now.

Yesterday there was some talks in the forums about how sites that load slowly and are using google adwords to promote them, can see their quality score lowered. Google uses a number of factors in determining quality score but this appears to be a new one. This is from the Google AdWords FAQ:

Beginning in February 2008, you’ll be able to see a grade for your website’s load time in your AdWords account. ‘Load time’ refers to the amount of time it takes for a user to arrive at your functional landing page after clicking your ad.

Several weeks after your load time grade becomes visible, it will begin to impact your landing page quality and, therefore, your Quality Score. We recommend working to improve your load time during this interim if it’s received a low score.

Google offers a few tips in terms of bettering your load times

- Using fewer redirects
- Using smaller, more highly-compressed images
- Limiting use of iframes

Other factors like use of external stylesheets and javascript calls (limiting javascript as much as possible), global headers & footers, and fewer http requests also can help.