In our continuing series on KPI monitoring & diagnosis, today we’re going to dig into changes to click volume.

There are several reasons that your clicks change over time. 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.

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.

• How to automate your Google Ads KPI monitoring and make fixes fixes fast
• How to ensure you analyze the correct data, time periods, timeframes, and trends for your PPC account
• How to turn complex PPC data into simple stories
• Free Looker Studio report to monitor KPIs

Impression share series

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

• PPC & KPI monitoring: How to diagnose changes to your impressions and search volume
• PPC & KPI monitoring: How to diagnose and work with Impression share loss due to Budget
• PPC & KPI monitoring: How to diagnose Lost search impression share rank & Top impression share changes

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.

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 multiplied by 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 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 shift was that Google udpated how phrase and modified broad match work. The new search term variations this company was showing for weren’t 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 impressions in-depth. In our next article, we’ll examine why your CTR changes.

If you’d like to find out more about how Adalysis can help with KPI monitoring and diagnosis, please check out:

• Performance monitoring
• Performance boosting