Measuring paid search performance for support and advice content

Most articles I’ve read about paid search advertising are about commercial websites. The goal for support and advice content on the Scope website are quite different. Our content aims to help disabled people and their families solve problems.

We use paid search marketing to help people find the pages they need. And recently we’ve been thinking about how we measure its performance.

Some of the standard pay-per-click metrics are the same as for commercial websites. We look at:

• impressions
• ad clicks and click through rate
• cost per click

But when we start to think about conversion rates, things get tricky.

Conversions

Conversion rate is an important success measure for paid search marketing. On commercial websites the goal is ‘conversion’ when the customer:

• buys a product
• subscribes to a newsletter
• books an event.

But what does ‘conversion’ mean for content that provides support and advice for disabled people and their families? There’s no transaction at the end of the customer journey.

We’ve decided to define ‘conversion’ as the user engaging with the content. And we’ve assumed that this means either:

• reading most of the page, or
• clicking on a link to get more information or take an action

Our content has failed if neither of those things happen.

We recently migrated our Google Analytics reporting to GA4. This has helped us refine the way we measure these criteria.

Reading the content

We’ve created a custom event, page_read. Google records a page_read when the user scrolls to 75% of page and spends more than 30 seconds on the page.

Clicking links on the page

A typical web page has many links, including standard links in the header and footer of the page.

We are specific about the type of link clicks that ‘count’. In our context, links are meaningful only if they go to:

• another advice and support page, or
• an external page

We use the GA4 ‘click’ event and filter the link URL to restrict the event count to the types of links we are interested in.

Conversion rates

So now we can calculate conversion rates for these 2 criteria.

Read conversion rate

The number of page_read events as a percentage of the number of sessions for the page.

Click conversion rate

The number of ‘meaningful’ link clicks as a percentage of the number of sessions for the page.

Traffic quality

We compare conversion rates for paid traffic and organic traffic. Is there is a difference in traffic quality between the 2 sources?

Sometimes we find that read conversions are higher for 1 source and click conversions higher for the other. We think this is OK.

But if paid traffic has lower conversion rates than organic for both types of conversion, there could be a problem. The paid ads could be creating expectations that the page does not meet. So, we review the keywords, headlines and descriptions. They should be an accurate reflection of the information and advice provided on the page.

Collaboration

The content design team and digital marketing team work closely together. We review paid search performance each month.

We iterate keywords and copy for ads that are performing poorly. Then we check the data again to see if we made a difference.

Our aims are simple. We want to get the best value from our advertising budget. And we want to help disabled people find the information they need.