Services

Paid Media 

The paid search metrics (assuming that there is a paid search component to the program) should align with the behaviors you are trying to change. 

Here are some of the most popular paid search metrics: 

• Impressions— An impression happens when a paid search ad appears on the search engine results page. This metric counts the number of such impressions. 

• Clicks— This is probably the easiest metric to understand. It counts the number of times a user clicks on an ad and visits the predetermined landing page. 

• CTR— The CTR is often expressed as a ratio, and it is the number of clicks an ad gets versus the number of impressions received. 

• Cost per click (CPC)— CPC is the average amount an advertiser would pay for a click. 

• Impression share— This is the ratio of the impressions your ad received to the possible impressions it could have received. This is similar to the share of conversation in social media analytics. 

• Sales or revenue per click— Quite simply, this is the amount of money generated per click received on an ad. 

• Average position— This metric measures where your advertisement appeared on the search engine results page.

Organic Search

What are the metrics that communicators can use? The following are a handful of the ones that are commonly used: 

• Known and unknown keywords— How many keywords do you know that are driving people to your website? How many do you not know? Is there an opportunity to optimize your content based on those unknown keywords? It is very possible that your unknown keywords are also unknown to your competitors. 

• Known and unknown branded keywords— Similar to the known and unknown keywords, communicators need to understand which words about their brand are being used most often. 

• Total visits— Ideally, you are tracking total visits to your website in your web analytics platform, but this metric could also fall under the organic search bucket as well. 

• Total conversions from known keywords— If you are properly optimizing your content based on known keywords people are using, then you should see an uptick in conversion. Again, in this case, conversions could be a dollar figure, downloads, signing up for a newsletter, and so on. 

• Average search position— Yes, this metric overlaps with paid searches, but it is important to know where you rank in search engine results pages, based on your top known and unknown and branded or unbranded keywords.