KPI Monitoring & Diagnosis: Why Does the Number of Clicks You Receive Change Over Time?

By Brad

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General, Performance Analyzer

In our continuing series on KPI Monitoring & Diagnosis, today we’re going to dig into examining changes to Click Volume.

There are several reasons that your clicks change when comparing two time frames. The most common is that your overall impressions changed. If your impressions go up or down, then in most cases, you will see a change to clicks.

In many cases, diagnosing why you have a change to clicks is directly related to examining why you have a change to your impressions. We’ve already discussed changes to impressions in detail, so this is an excellent time to catch everyone up on the series and then get back to clicks later in the article.

KPI Monitoring: Why & How.

The first section of this series looks at how to monitor KPIs, what you should monitor, how to automate this monitoring, and data storytelling.

Impression Share Series:

We started the series looking through impression numbers. This includes your search volume, impressions, lost impression share due to rank and budget.

The Click Metrics

If you want to diagnose changes to clicks, the first step is to look at the changes to Impressions and search volume.

The second part is looking at how clicks are generated.

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When we look at what happens at the time of the click, it’s quite simple.

Every time you receive an impression, you have a chance of a click (and a conversion as well). If a user clicks on your ad, then you pay the CPC for that auction. You can quickly determine average CPC by keyword, ad group, campaign, or account.

Your average CPC, along with your total number of clicks, is equal to your cost. Technically, Google adds together each individual click price to get to your total cost, but from a large scale diagnosis standpoint, looking at average CPC and clicks to arrive at cost is more useful than seeing each individual CPC.

As your impressions or your CTR changes, then your click numbers change.

A change to CTR can come from many places. In this instance, the CTR dropped, which meant that even though this advertiser received 27% more impressions, they only received 25% more clicks. The reason for the CTR change was Google changed how phrase and modified broad match worked recently, and the new search term variations this company was showing for were not relevant, and it caused their CTR to fall.

This is just one example of many possibilities to why your CTR can change.

We’ve gone through the changes to impression in-depth. In our next article, we’ll examine why your CTR changes. The possible options are quite vast.

To make sure you receive these new articles, you can subscribe and automatically receive updates.

We hope you continue enjoying this lengthy and in-depth series on KPI monitoring, diagnosis, and receive a comprehensive understanding of how all your PPC metrics are related 🙂

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