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Google Ads Metrics That You Should Be Tracking
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Myles Root

I have helped over 15+ brands across multiple niches purely with Google Ads strategy for the last 1.2 years. On a monthly basis I work with 5-6 eCommerce brands doing 6+ & 7+ figures a year and manage between £68k - £100k in ad spend every month. I help them move away from reliance on Meta by creating a new customer acquisition strategy in Google Ads.

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Myles Root
  • I have helped over 15+ brands across multiple niches purely with Google Ads strategy for the last 1.2 years.
  • On a monthly basis I work with 5-6 eCommerce brands doing 6+ & 7+ figures a year and manage between £68k - £100k in ad spend every month.
  • I help them move away from reliance on Meta by creating a new customer acquisition strategy in Google Ads.
Client Results & Video Testimonials

Home & Roost // 21% More Revenue In 30 Days

How We Helped Alan Add An Additional 21% Revenue at 8x MER

Perun Moto // Almost Doubling Revenue In 45 Days

Going From $22,583/month to $38,334/month in 45 days. Client Interview With Nikola From Perun Moto.

In-Channel Metrics
Cost Per Action (CPA)
Formula
total cost / conversions
How Often Should You Measure Changes
Monthly
What Is It?
This metric is often used in-app. It's a metric that is more about attribution, and not actually about your business. It's good to check the health of your campaign, but not your business. You would never say Meta is doing worse than Google as they are two different platforms, starting/ending two different journeys from the same person.
Why It's Important.
It's extremely important to not rely on this metric to determine the health of your company. The CPA is only a snapshot in time of an existing channel's attribution capability to tell you how much that particualr part of that person's journey in that channel cost you. It's good to tell you if an app that is identifying that small part of the customer journey is becoming more/less efficient.
What To Look For.
Your CPA in more top-funnel campaigns are going to be much more than your bottom-funnel CPA. Most of the time, both of those CPAs are for the same person. That's why you shouldn't compare them, but instead add them together to give you a semi-realistic nCAC. Pushing a TOF YT campaign on Google and meta should reduce your brand CPA.
Return On Ad Spend (ROAS)
Formula
total rev / total cost
How Often Should You Measure Changes
Monthly
What Is It?
A singular metric that measures the efficiency of a journey in one particular part of the customer journey in one specific channel.
Why It's Important.
ROAS is not a healthy business metric to look at. It's a good in-app, in-campaign metric to look at but only when you know what that number should look like. It tells you in-app how cold/warm the audience is that you're going after, as well as what is the return of that portion of the customer journey through that stage. The reason why you mustn't compare ROAS between different channels to determine business health is because it is usually a click-attributed metric. Meaning did they click and can I see the return. Very little clicks come from YouTube, therefore very little return can be identified.
What To Look For.
The ROAS in-app is going to look worse the colder something gets. High ROAS Google ads campaigns are usually going to warm traffic / people who know the brand. TOF should be at a benchmark of 0.25 - 0.5, MOF should be 1-2-3, BOF should be 5, 10, 15, 20.
CPC
Formula
Total Ad spend / Number of clicks
How Often Should You Measure Changes
Weekly
What Is It?
Emalgamation of returning + new traffic in one metric.
Why It's Important.
This is a good metric to track trends inside of the application (Google) itself. If CPCs become more expensive in-app it could be because you're acquiring more new website traffic that is more expensive. It should always be used in conjunction with other metrics to ask whether a rise/fall is a good/bad thing.
What To Look For.
A CPC movement in-app is a signal to look at the other two metrics to ensure 1. the audience is the same, 2. competitors. Sometimes the rise in CPC is a good thing. Let's say you have a cold-traffic campaign that's targeting quite a warm audience, this means lower CPCs. When it goes more cold, CPCs rise, so the campaign is likely to help your nCAC reduce as you're attracting more of the people you want in that campaign.
Overall Metrics
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Formula
total marketing cost / all customers
How Often Should You Measure Changes
Monthly
What Is It?
Average cost incurred to acquire a customer (new and returning) within a date-range.
Why It's Important.
How much it costs to acquire both new and returning customers. If you're looking to keep stable and not grow your business, it's a good way of looking at how well optimised all of your marketing costs are.
What To Look For.
If you push spend into a channel, and see it increase, you may be going after new customers that are more expensive. If you see an increase / decrease in CAC, you'd need to compare with how many new vs. returning customers there were in that date range to figure out how warm / cold your campaigns are. Some channels are better at re-acquiring customers, others at acquiring new ones. By looking at CAC and nCAC you can determine what your channel is best at.
New Customer Acquisition Cost (nCAC)
Formula
total marketing cost / new customers
How Often Should You Measure Changes
Monthly
What Is It?
Average cost incurred to acquire a new customer within a date range.
Why It's Important.
Most companies can only scale by acquiring new customers, it's difficult to scale by acquiring existing customers. Sometimes pushing more money into a channel doesn't change the existing sales cycle of your customers. Knowing global nCAC allows you to determine whether a channel has a good topline effect of pushing new customers.
What To Look For.
A good way to test if a channel is efficient at optimising for new customer growth is that if you start to push in ad spend to an area that you believe is more top of funnel / prospecting and it works well then you should see an increase in new customers but the nCAC should stay fairly static. Every $ in is working well to generate a 1:1 ratio new customers.
Media Efficiency Ratio (MER)
Formula
total revenue / total marketing expenses
How Often Should You Measure Changes
Quarterly
What Is It?
The amount of money that you're spending on all marketing channels / revenue from all marketing. All cash in vs. all cash out. Similar to CAC it's all money out vs. all revenue.
Why It's Important.
Good to find out if you're spending money in the right direction. If I do X, Y, Z is the revenue coming back at the same rate? I.e. If you're at a MER of 5x and then you put $100 into a channel, if your MER drops then that channel isn't can't be scaled efficiently right now. Maybe there's other places to put it that would work better for the customer journey.
What To Look For.
On non-click networks your 'return' will often be through organic and direct as well as brand search, hence why you need an overall metric.
New Customer MER
Formula
total revenue from new customers / total marketing expenses
How Often Should You Measure Changes
Quarterly
What Is It?
Identical to MER but it measures all cash out vs. all cash in from new customers. If you want to grow, you want to keep an nMER which is static.
Why It's Important.
For growth-minded companies it let's you identify how much money you can put in before you see a diminishing return. MER is usually higher than nMER. It might be 5x vs. 2x. That's because you're buying a new customer at a 2x MER, but their LTV is turning them into a 5x MER.
What To Look For.
MER and nMER should stay fairly static. If you put spend into a channel and you see that your nMER and MER stay static that is a good thing. If you put spend in to channels that deliver a good customer nAOV and same LTV, but your MER drops, then that means the efficiency is dropping.
1-3-6-12 Month LTV
Formula
AOV x Repeat Purchase Rate x Customer Lifespan
How Often Should You Measure Changes
Quarterly
What Is It?
What is the lifetime value of a customer. How often will they purchase and what AOV.
Why It's Important.
Tracks how valuable a new customer is to you. A simple ratio to use is nCAC:LTV. You will also have an nCAC payback, which means how much and how long does it take for the nCAC to be made up for by the LTV and then become profitable from then on.
What To Look For.
If you have a customer that returns every month to make a $30 purchase then you know that you can have a $100 nCAC and still be profitable. It's important to measure when the nCPA payback is.
Gross Profit ($GP)
Formula
Total Revenue - COGS
How Often Should You Measure Changes
Monthly
What Is It?
Shows the total revenue after subtracting the cost of goods sold. It tells you the immediate efforts of your marketing towards the sale of the product.
Why It's Important.
Gross profit is the biggest indicator of whether your business supports paid traffic. Can that margin, factored with the cost of traffic, be profitable. It tells you how much you can spend to acquire a new customer before the additional costs are incurred.
What To Look For.
A comparison to your nCAC. If it takes $50 of nCAC to sell someone a $100 product at a 50% margin then your already at a breakeven on gross before you factor in additional costs such as overhead, employees, scale, new inventory....
Profit Margin ($PM)
Formula
Gross Profit / Total Revenue
How Often Should You Measure Changes
Monthly
What Is It?
The total net contribution of marketing to your business.
Why It's Important.
It is the true north star of your business. You want to find a MER that delivers a profit margin that is healthy and then set it so you cannot dip below.
What To Look For.
Average Order Value (AOV)
Formula
total revenue / no. of orders
How Often Should You Measure Changes
Monthly
What Is It?
The average revenue earned per order placed from both new and returning customers.
Why It's Important.
Your AOV depends on your product, and whether the person is a returning customer or not. AOV doesn't change much, and is therefore a good metric to track. If there are large upsets to AOV then something has happened.
What To Look For.
A spike in AOV might signal you've had a lot of returning customers in that time period. A drop in AOV might signal that you're getting a lot more cold customers who don't like/trust you yet so haven't spent as much.
New Customer AOV
Formula
total revenue from new customers / total new customer orders
How Often Should You Measure Changes
Monthly
What Is It?
The average revenue earned per order placed from just new customers.
Why It's Important.
Tracking nAOV vs. AOV let's you identify what the AOV is of someone who is new to your business. Buying from someone the first time is usually a test, do I like the product / process.
What To Look For.
nAOV is usually lower. If it remains static you can compare it to the AOV. I have an nCAC of $100, my nAOV is $50, but then my AOV shoots up to $85. This means that customers become compoundingly more valuable over time because there is an increase + an LTV.
New Site Visits (NV)
Formula
Number of new unique visitors
How Often Should You Measure Changes
Daily
What Is It?
Amount of new visitors to your site. More new visitors = more growth minded business.
Why It's Important.
The more new visitors you have in your traffic, the more growth minded your company is. It's very difficult to scale new customers when a campaign/site is predominantly returning visitors. So knowing the new visitors for a campaign/channel will tell you how effective that campaign will be for scaling.
What To Look For.
If you spend $100/day and $50 goes to new visitors and $50 goes to returning visitors every dollar is only 50% as effective at gaining new acquired customers which means nCAC will be double. If campaigns are heavy with returning visitors, don't try to scale those campaigns thinking that it's bringing new customers because the CPA might look good as it's BOF but new customers won't grow.
Returning Site Visits (RV)
Formula
Number of returning visitors
How Often Should You Measure Changes
Daily
What Is It?
This is the opposite of nWV. The rWV is returning website visitors.
Why It's Important.
Tells you how cold vs. warm the traffic is that your campaign / channel is marketing to.
What To Look For.
In re-marketing campaigns the cost for rWV and the CPC should be aligned when the rWV is 80% or more of the campaign traffic.
Effective Cost Per New Visitor (eCPNV)
Formula
Total cost of marketing and sales / number of new visits
How Often Should You Measure Changes
Monthly
What Is It?
Cost of the new visitors coming to your site.
Why It's Important.
Any campaign will a mix between warm and cold traffic. The cold is much more expensive than the warm typically. PMax and advantage+ campaigns will have a fair amount of warm traffic that is inexpensive. The average of your CPCs depends on your warm and cold traffic.
What To Look For.
When you're trying to scale a campaign and you see that your traffic is half warm and half cold, and you have a $1 CPC you may see that the eCPNV is $2. So that campaign is twice as expensive as you think. If I want to scale to hit a particular nCAC in X part of the new customer journey then you need to know how much every $ is going to generate a new visitor to the site to know how that will incrementally increase/decrease nCAC/conv. rate.
How To Measure
My Tracking Spreadsheet

Google Docs

Important Traffic Metrics: Public

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