NOTE: Updated March 2022.
Being able to see PPC analytics in Beacon is one of the platform’s other key benefits outside of click fraud protection as it allows digital marketers easy access to vital PPC campaign data.
There’s a minefield of information available through Google Analytics and Ad platforms so being able to identify PPC campaign performance comes fraught with time-consuming and laborious effort.
How To See PPC Analytics In Beacon
Beacon is a click fraud protection platform, with an awesome PPC click fraud feature. It gives PPC managers and agencies the full picture on how their paid search campaigns are performing with a key metrics dashboard and reporting to provide quick visibility of campaign performance at campaign level all the way down to individual ads.
The platform generates tracked ‘Beacon Links’ to measure campaigns, website traffic and leads generated by your online marketing activity.
Once you’ve started using Beacon, you can see your PPC analytics by connecting your PPC account. Using Beacon’s ad connector for Facebook, Instagram and Google, this couldn’t be simpler.
Beacon PPC campaign Dashboard
The screenshot below shows PPC analytics for a client campaign in Beacon.
Multi-channel campaign performance is provided with the key metrics of page loads, visitors, engaged visitors (more on this later) and leads. Website analytics of average pageviews, bounce rate and average time on site are also provided on the dashboard view.
Plus, unique to Beacon and not available in Google Analytics, the clicks performed by humans and the clicks by bots (the clicks you don’t want to pay for) are identified and highlighted in the dashboard. In this example shown above, there were 34,746 clicks and 27,375 of these were human visitors (more on this further on!).
All Your PPC Channels in One Analytics Platform
In Beacon, PPC campaign performance can be measured across all channels including:
- Facebook Audience Network
- Facebook Messenger
- AdRoll
- Tik Tok
- Snapchat
- Bing
- Linked In
Cost Per Visit (CPV)
Understanding your Cost Per Visit is a way for PPC marketers to analyse the effects of their online efforts and is another vital metric to add to the existing CPM (Cost per Mille/Thousand Impressions), CPC (Cost Per Click), and CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) to work out how effective your PPC campaigns are.
In Beacon, you can see the advertising CPV by campaign, channel, link, post and ad.
Cost Per Lead (CPL)
Beacon’s mission is to protect against click fraud and highlight the true cost and value of your digital marketing. The Cost Per Lead metric tells you how much you’re wasting on fraudulent or bot clicks (non-human clicks). You will see the true cost of sending humans and bots to your campaign landing pages. This is often a real-eye opener!
By digging down into individual campaign and advert performance, you can see how many human clicks were made against how many were bot clicks.
The screengrab below of a Beacon e-book campaign shows that the campaign cost was £256 across 10 different ads and generated 636 clicks, 291 of which were human visitors and 345 were bots. The non-human bot clicks equates to a waste of £134.
You may not be aware, but there will be bot clicks on your campaigns and they could account for anything between 15% and 55% of your campaign clicks. In fact, studies show that on average, around 20% of PPC clicks are fraudulent – check out our infographic on this.
Do not fear, Beacon has click fraud protection to block the bots!
Measuring Visitor Engagement
Beacon attributes an engagement rating for each website visitor generated by your campaign based on various factors such as time on page, scroll depth and page views.
This is used to create an overall performance rating for your campaigns, giving an easy at a glance view of campaign effectiveness.
Cost Per Engaged Visitor
Going back to the e-book campaign example, you can see the Cost Per Human Visitor (CPV) is £0.88 but the Cost Per Engaged Visitor (CPEV) is £3.12. This gives a total CPL for the overall campaign of £15.06.
You can now use this information to modify your budget spend to use less (or zero) on the ads with the most expensive CPL and more on those with a lower cost CPL. Over time, the overall CPL will reduce and campaign Return on Investment (ROI) will improve.
Engagement Summary
Within Beacon, all of your PPC analytics are summarised nicely in this engagement summary:
PPC Analytics Begin With A Link
All your online campaigns are powered by Beacon Links. They’re what we use to track your website visitor journeys and to measure the performance of your online campaign success.
This specifically shortened link is automatically created within the Beacon platform when you link to a page on your website and it provides visitor engagement data each time a visitor lands on your website from it.
When you set up your campaigns, you will be using a Beacon Link as the starting point for your data tracking. Beacon’s campaigns act as a place to group all the Beacon Links you’ve created to promote a specific marketing message or have used in a way you want to track.
Beyond The Click
Beacon provides a comprehensive view of PPC analytics. You can see all the links you’ve used for any individual campaign, the number of visits made, and the visitor behaviour from each link click.
There is also an overall visitor profile which breaks down the geographical locations, as well as the device type being used.
Level Up Your PPC analytics
Using Beacon helps digital marketers get an actual “apples for apples” cost comparison, while also removing all non-human clicks and inaccuracies that result from relying on the data supplied by the PPC ad channels themselves.
Having instant access to meaningful PPC click fraud and campaign metrics means you can measure real human engaged visitors and leads or sales generated by your campaigns.
Get started with Beacon
Start your marketing campaign journey by having the best available data. At Beacon we’ve been champions of transparent marketing data since our foundation.
With click fraud detection and mitigation across search and social, Beacon feeds other parts of the Martech stack with better quality data, to enable improved analytics, decision-making and results.
See what Beacon can do for you or the brands you represent by watching a 4 minute demo video. Or calculate how much you might be losing on your paid media campaigns to click fraud with our click fraud Calculator.