What is a successful campaign? It can be quite difficult to differentiate a campaign enough to categorise them as successes or failures. The problem is that for different advertisers, they will judge the success of their campaigns down to different things. For this reason, it would be a good idea to make some general assumptions about a few ways you can measure the success of a pay per click campaign.
 
 

Conversion Rate

This is the number one statistic that is used to judge how successful a campaign is. After all, if it wasn’t for this statistic and your campaign was based on sales, you wouldn’t make any money. The truth is that the conversions your campaigns produce will benefit you in some way be it for brand awareness, a financial benefit, or simply to gain details of a specified target market.
 
 

Click Through Rate

This statistic is commonly associated with being a statistic that will help the success of the campaign but does not depend on it. However, I do believe that a PPC campaign that has the potential to gain a high CTR is a successful campaign. This is because the campaign can react to real life events otherwise known as external factors (PESTEL):

• Politics.
• Environment.
• Society.
• Technology.
• Economy.
• Legality.

A campaign with a high CTR can react much faster to the above external factors. This is a huge benefit seeing that it is usually those who act first and fastest that gain maximum results. For example, look at a business example such as Apple. From creating the iPad a good year before any other business, they gained the strongest sales and share in from the tablet market. A high CTR does not mean you do not have to use it though: it means you have the potential to use it when the time calls for it.
 
 

Social Media

Some campaigns are solely based on creating as large a possible social media presence. You will usually find these campaigns to adopt a lead capture landing page (from the different types of landing pages there are out there) or even a click through page. Either way, social media is a great way to judge the success of a PPC campaign if that is what you want to gain out of your campaign. There are lots of websites out there that can work out the number of tweets, retweets, favourites, likes etc. from Facebook and Twitter to make clear how successful your campaign is running. For this, I typically use AddThis which provides statistics when it comes to social media presence.
 
 

Impressions

Although this might seem unlikely, if you want as much coverage and brand awareness as possible, you should look into measuring the success of your campaign on how many impressions it gains. Even if it doesn’t get clicked on, there is a strong chance the web user will read your advert. Therefore, you are still advertising to them: your brand and offer. There is every possibility later on, when the web user becomes more interested, that they search for your advert again and read more into your campaign’s contents.