Impressions clicks and cost of you Adwords campaign

These three crucial numbers, are at the heart of your campaign. Smart advertisers pay close attention to those numbers to save time, money, and heartache. 

Impressions 

  

Technically, an impression is a single instance of a search results page that contains your ad. It doesn’t mean the searcher has seen the ad, just a search results page with your ad on it. If the searcher has a small screen with high resolution and your ad appears below the scroll (meaning they’d have to scroll down in order to view it), it’s still counted as an impression. If they click the first listing they see, before they’ve looked at yours, it still counts.

Impressions can indicate the potential size of your Adwords market. If you are bidding on popular keywords, you can expect lots of impressions. But if your bidding strategy places your ad very low in the ad rankings, and it shows up on page 4 of the listings, you’ll see very few impressions even though the market itself may be huge. 

Clicks

A click is a single instance of a unique visitor clicking your ad and arriving at your landing URL. Clicks are good, right? The more clicks, the more visitors to your Web site. Well, not so fast. Clicks cost you money, remember? You make that investment back only when the visitor buys something from you. 

The goal of your ad is twofold: 

- To get all the people who will eventually buy from you to click your ad 

- To discourage all the people who will never buy from you from clicking your ad 

Obviously, you can’t know in advance who will buy and who won’t. But you can make some pretty good guesses until you graduate to the Standard Edition and implement conversion tracking. For example, if you’re advertising a pony tail holder worn by Paris Hilton, and you mention Paris Hilton in your ad and select Paris Hilton as a keyword, chances are you’ll find a lot of visitors who have no interest in your hair accessory but a lot of interest in, shall we say, a multimedia Paris Hilton experience.

As you gain Adwords experience, you’ll learn how to turn the prospect tap higher or lower to maximize profits. 

Cost

Your cost equals the total number of clicks multiplied by the average cost per click. If you are paying $2.05 per click and your campaign has racked up 17 clicks, your cost so far will be $2.05 × 17 = $34.85. You should track how long it takes you to use up your monthly budget. If it’s all gone in 3 days, you’re looking at 27 days with no activity. You should also track, as best you can, whether an increase in Adwords spending produces more sales and profits for you. After you graduate to the Standard Edition, you’ll benefit from much more powerful reporting tools that show you the profitability of each ad and each keyword. You can change the date range to see how your campaign has performed at different times.  

On the campaign management Control Panel, click the Change link next to the date range at the top left of the green header. You’ll be given a choice of presets: all time, today, yesterday, last 7 days, last week (Mon-Sun), last business week (Mon-Fri), this month, or last month. You can alternatively click the second radio button to select any range you want. This second option is useful if you’ve changed something on January 17 and you want to compare the 5 days before and after the change. The statistics don’t represent what your prospects are doing in real time. Google cops to a three-hour delay in click reporting. You can see impressions faster than that, usually. But don’t panic because your expected traffic surge hasn’t materialized two minutes after writing that irresistible ad. Patience, Grasshopper. 

Graphs and reports

If you’re a visual sort of person, check out the Graphs tab on the right of the green header bar. You will be shown clicks, cost, and impressions per day. If you want to view your campaign data in beautiful printed form for some late night reading in bed, or want to share some statistics with colleagues without having them log in to the account, you can download reports of impressions, clicks, and costs by keyword and ad. You get a choice of formats; chances are, if you have Microsoft Excel installed on your computer, you’ll choose .csv (for Excel).