Measuring Search Marketing Success: The Metrics That Matter

Conversions are what both you and your provider should be focused on, actively tracking from day one. If they don’t roll in straight away, don’t worry – amazing results don’t always come overnight. With PPC, it could take three months for results to roll in; SEO, it could take even longer, 3-6 months at a minimum.

So aside from conversions, what can you measure to ensure your search marketing is being successful? By the end of this article, you'll have a clear idea.

Understanding The Types of Search Traffic

There are two sides to search marketing: paid and organic. While both aim to get your business positioned in front of people making relevant searches, they work slightly differently. Each drives different types of traffic to your site, which from an analytical perspective, is important to understand.

Paid Traffic

Referring to the traffic coming from paid advertising (PPC), paid traffic is count for each time someone has clicked through to your site, from one your search ads. Search ads are housed within the results along the natural organic results, distinctly labelled with "Sponsored" or “Ad”.

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is "free" traffic that arrives at your site when people click on your natural search results, which don’t cost when clicked. More organic traffic is achieved through establishing better ranking, achieved gradually by investing in search engine optimisation (SEO)

How to Measure Your Search Performance Data

To gather data to measure what impact your search marketing is having, you’ll need to set up tracking to your website. There are many different free tools and platforms you can connect to your website, each of which serves their own unique purpose.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an analytics service offered by Google, used by most businesses today. It allows you to track valuable website data, specifically traffic, events, and user behaviour. The platform provides insights into all your search data, both paid and organic traffic.

Although owned by Google, it doesn't just track Google Search data. You can use it to see the impact your search marketing is having across all search engines, including Bing, Yahoo, and even newer places users search for answers, like ChatGPT.

Google Search Console / Bing Webmaster Tools

Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are essential platforms for measuring SEO performance from their respective search engines. Each tracks and presents valuable data that comes from being seen in search - clicks, impressions, click-through-rate (CTR), and average positions. The data can be filtered by page, over different time frames, and even specific queries. Below the overview, a detailed breakdown of performance for all queries is available.

Alongside search performance data, each tool also provides insights into technical performance, from indexing and experience to security and manual actions. To make it easier for the dedicated crawlers to effectively index your website, you can submit your website's sitemap and request any removals of your pages from their index.

Microsoft Clarity

Microsoft Clarity is a free analytics tool that helps you gain clarity into how users interact with your website. Beyond standard dashboard metrics, it provides powerful visual data through heatmaps and session recordings, both with advanced filtering options.

When integrated with Google Analytics, it provides you with clear overview as to where users come from and how they behave once they land on your site. This includes but isn’t limited to data on how many pages they view, what they click, and how far they scroll. Also highlighting user experience insights such as rage clicks, dead clicks, and excessive scrolling, it makes it easy for you to detect areas of friction or confusion on your site.

The Search Marketing Metrics That Matter

All search marketing metrics matter, but some naturally, are more important than others. Consider average position - it can look bad when it drops (suggesting you're ranking higher), but if impressions or clicks don’t follow, it means little in practice.

Conversions

Conversions are whatever drives your business a return. No conversions = no return – with a doubt, they’re the most important metric that should be at the forefront of any search marketing strategy.

Conversions you’ve gained from search can be tracked using Google Analytics, marked as key events. Simply navigate to reports > acquisition > traffic acquisition and filter the data for organic and paid search.

Clicks

Clicks account for the number of times your site has been clicked through to in search results. The higher your click through rate (CTR), the better, indicating your results are relevant and match user intent. No traffic = no conversions – clicks, although they don’t directly drive a return, they’re an important metric to moving closer towards success.

To track clicks across both paid and organic, you can't use Google Analytics. For organic performance, Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools give detailed click data, including which queries they’re coming from. On the paid side, Google Ads and Microsoft Ads provide in-depth reports with associated costs and the keywords behind each click.

Impressions

Impressions are a count for how many times you’re site has been seen in search. As such, the more impressions, the better, according what you’re being seen for is relevant and clicks follow. Impressions are the foundation of all search metrics: if you're not being seen, you're not going to be clicked, and you're certainly not going to convert.

Unlike other metrics, impressions can’t be tracked in Google Analytics. For organic impressions, use Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, which offer detailed breakdowns by query. For paid search, rely on the ad platforms themselves - Google Ads and Microsoft Ads - to view impression data by keyword, audience, and campaign.

Average Engagement Time

Average engagement time refers to how long users stay on your site, on average, after clicking through.It’s a highly useful metric for understanding whether visitors are actually engaging with your content. A short engagement time can signal issues like poor content, a frustrating user experience, or a mismatch between your page and the searcher’s intent.

You can track average engagement time per active user in Google Analytics, using the Reports Snapshot as a quick overview. To filter specifically for search traffic, go to Reports> Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition. You can also gain additional insights in Microsoft Clarity, which provides more detailed data.

How You Can Use Data To Shape Future Search Success

Data is extremely powerful when it comes to search marketing. Enabling you to see what’s working and what’s not, it enables you to make data-driven decisions that empower even better performance.

Use of Data in SEO

For SEO, past performance data can be used in many ways to shape the next stage of your strategy. Things done for SEO don’t always work first time round; using data strategically, you can uncover the areas that need further improvement, amongst various other things.

Identify user experience issues

User experience can make or break your SEO performance. As such, it won’t necessarily hurt your visibility but will reducing the return you’ll get from users once they actually clickthrough to your site. That said, if users struggle, the likelihood is search engines will too.

To detect issues with user experience, Microsoft Clarity and Google Analytics are extremely helpful. Packed with metrics like bounce rate, dead clicks, quick back, average pages per session, and average engagement rate, you should be able to easily detect issues.

Uncover areas for improvement

SEO isn't a one-time fix - it's an ongoing process that requires constant refinement and optimisation. By monitoring performance data, you can uncover areas that require further improvement.

Google Search Console is particularly valuable for this, showing you an overview of performance, along with detailed breakdowns. By comparing this data over time,you can easily discover which queries or pages have seen declining performance and uncover potential areas for improvement.

Discover new opportunities

Besides keyword and competitor data you can gather from SEO research, you can actually use your past performance to spot new opportunities. For example, you might have a broad page around "SEO Auditing" that's ranking for more specific queries like "SEO Auditing for Small Businesses", but poorly.

To get insights into exactly what your site is being seen for in search, you can use Google Search Console. Breaking down the data by queries, you can see what you're getting impressions for but are ranking fairly low, which could potentially be worth creating new, dedicated pages for.

Use of Data in PPC

Data is the backbone of PPC. Decisions driven by it, management would be impossible without it. If you just set up ads without keeping an eye on performance, you'll likely see a lot of money going out and not much coming back in.

Refine keyword targeting

Keywords can spiral out of control very quickly. One keyword might eat up most of your budget,while others branch out and trigger your ads for irrelevant searches. For best performance, their data should be monitored regularly.

Reviewing the search terms report, available in both Google Ads and Microsoft Ads, will uncover what your ads are being seen for and which keywords triggered them. When you identify irrelevant searches, you can add them to your negative keywords list to take control. For keywords that are taking over and powering most of the performance data, experiment by pausing them and measure the impact.

Improve ads

Low click-through rates (CTRs) and high bounce rates are clear indicators that your ads aren't resonating with your target audience. By keeping track of these metrics and others like them, you can identify when ad copy or landing pages need improvement.

For high bounce rates, consider what users experience when they click through to your landing pages. Ask yourself how relevant the content is to their search intent and how it compares to competitors' offerings. Using Microsoft Clarity, you can get clear visual insights into how users actually interact with your pages. For low click trhough rates, test different headlines, descriptions, and calls-to-action, then monitor the performance impact in Google or Microsoft Ads.

Optimise Bid Strategies

Choosing the right bidding strategies for your campaigns can make all the difference. Start off on the wrong bid strategy, your performance will likely be limited - the same goes if you set too optimistic with its limits.

To better understand how your bid strategy is performing, configure your columns in Google Ads or Microsoft Ads to include metrics like Search Lost IS, Top of Page Rate, Impression Share, and Conversion Value / Cost. These metrics can help you identify many issues, like your bids are too low, your targets too strict, and so on.

Get The Search Marketing Metrics That Matter Going Up

Search marketing can be a great way to drive more success for your business, but it can take time. Before conversions roll in, it’s important to consider other metrics like impressions and clicks; yes, they don’t drive you a return, yet anyway. As longas what you’re getting driving traffic is relevant, you’re heading in the right direction - conversions should eventually roll in.

Ready to get the right metrics going up? Work with me and I’ll help you work towards and achieve your goals from search. A search marketing specialist with a set focus on turning clicks into conversions, I stand to help you invest with confidence -  I don’t talk the talk, I deliver.

Take your next step towards search success – get in touch with me today to learn more about my professional SEO and PPC services.

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