The 8 Essential PPC KPIs That Can Drive Your Business Growth

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has long been a cornerstone of digital marketing, but the landscape has changed dramatically in recent years. With advancements in AI, multi-device usage, and evolving privacy regulations, the way we measure PPC success needs a serious overhaul. If you’re still stuck using outdated metrics like click-through rate (CTR) and cost-per-click (CPC), it’s time to catch up. In today’s competitive environment, you need to track KPIs that truly reflect the profitability and long-term success of your campaigns.

Here, we’ll dive into the 8 most important PPC KPIs that you should be tracking. These KPIs go beyond the basics and focus on driving meaningful business outcomes, not just vanity metrics. Let’s break down the real indicators of success for modern PPC.

1. Profit (Not Just ROAS)

For years, Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) has been the go-to metric for assessing PPC performance. While it’s a helpful indicator, it doesn’t tell the full story. ROAS simply measures revenue generated for every dollar spent, but it fails to consider costs like fulfilment, shipping, or discounts. A campaign that shows a high ROAS might look good on paper, but if a large chunk of the revenue is eaten up by these hidden costs, you’re left with little to show for it.

The modern PPC team focuses on profit, not just revenue. By calculating contribution margins at the product level and adjusting revenue figures accordingly, you can feed profit data directly into your PPC platforms. This allows platforms like Google Ads and Microsoft Ads to optimise for profit, rather than just revenue. When you show your CMO not just the revenue you’ve generated but the actual profit, you’re earning respect for making smarter decisions with the ad budget.

2. Incrementality: The True Impact of Your Campaigns

Incrementality is a key KPI that separates marketers who merely report on data and those who truly understand their campaigns. Essentially, incrementality answers a crucial question: Did this sale happen because of your PPC campaign, or would it have happened anyway?

Attribution has always been a tricky area in digital marketing, especially with users jumping between devices and channels. While it’s easy to assume that the last click led to a conversion, that assumption may be far from the truth. Incrementality helps you measure the true lift your PPC campaigns provide – the actual sales generated because of your campaign, and not just those tagged as conversions.

This can be measured through holdout tests, geo-based experiments, or platform-led lift studies. By measuring incrementality, you ensure that you’re not over-crediting your PPC efforts for sales that would have happened without the campaign. Incrementality testing can also help you identify which campaigns are truly contributing to your business growth, helping you allocate resources more effectively.

3. Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): Think Beyond the First Sale

In a world where acquisition costs are rising and attribution windows are shrinking, focusing on Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) is a game-changer. LTV is the total revenue a customer will generate over their entire relationship with your brand. Rather than just measuring the first sale, you need to look at how valuable that customer will be in the long run.

This is particularly crucial for businesses that rely on repeat customers, like SaaS, subscription models, or direct-to-consumer brands. A low-cost acquisition that brings in a one-time buyer may not be as valuable as a higher-cost acquisition that turns into a loyal, repeat customer.

Advanced PPC teams are feeding LTV data into Google Ads through offline conversion imports, enabling smarter bidding strategies that target customers who are more likely to return and make additional purchases. This shift from short-term metrics to long-term customer value ensures that your campaigns are aligned with sustainable growth, rather than quick wins.

4. Cost Per Incremental Acquisition (CPIA)

Cost Per Incremental Acquisition (CPIA) is another powerful KPI for modern PPC campaigns. While Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) has been the standard for a long time, CPIA goes a step further. Instead of asking, “What did we pay per conversion?” CPIA asks, “What did we pay to acquire a net-new customer who wouldn’t have converted without this campaign?”

Many PPC campaigns are bloated with conversions that don’t bring much incremental value. For example, branded search ads, remarketing, and display ads might bring in sales, but they could simply be cannibalising traffic that would have converted organically. By layering incrementality testing into your analysis, you can understand what you’re really paying for: new, incremental customers.

This KPI helps ensure that your ad spend is driving meaningful growth, not just filling up the funnel with people who would have purchased anyway.

5. Conversion Rate: Context is Key

Conversion rate remains a critical metric in PPC, but it’s not enough to simply look at the numbers in isolation. Without context, conversion rates can be misleading. A cold prospect clicking on a YouTube ad will not convert at the same rate as someone clicking on a branded search ad. However, many PPC reports present a flat average conversion rate, which doesn’t tell the full story.

To get a true picture of your campaign performance, it’s essential to contextualise your conversion rates. Break them down by:

• Audience type (new vs returning)
• Funnel stage
• Device, geography, and time of day

Understanding these nuances lets you see if your campaigns are reaching the right people at the right time. If you’re running an upper-funnel prospecting campaign, and your conversion rate drops, it may actually be a good sign that you’re reaching new audiences who are unfamiliar with your brand. By looking at conversion rates in context, you can avoid knee-jerk optimisations that hurt long-term growth.

6. Lead Quality: Quality Over Quantity

For lead generation campaigns, the focus must shift from quantity to quality. It’s easy to celebrate reaching your Cost-Per-Lead (CPL) target, but if half of those leads are never going to convert into customers, you’re wasting your resources. The goal should always be to generate qualified leads that have a high likelihood of turning into paying customers.

To measure lead quality, integrate Customer Relationship Management (CRM) data into your PPC strategy. Track metrics like:

• Marketing qualified lead (MQL) to sales qualified lead (SQL) conversion rates
• Pipeline contribution
• Revenue sourced from PPC

By feeding this data back into your ad platforms, you can optimise campaigns to focus on leads that generate actual business, rather than just leads that fill out forms.

7. Time to Conversion: Understand the Buying Journey

In many industries, especially B2B and considered purchases, conversions don’t happen right after a click. Time to conversion refers to the amount of time it takes for a user to convert after clicking on your ad. Many leads, particularly for higher-value items, may need 45, 60, or even 90+ days to make a decision.

Knowing your actual conversion lag helps you:

• Build realistic retargeting windows
• Set proper expectations with stakeholders
• Avoid prematurely shutting down high-performing campaigns

Understanding time to conversion is also critical in an era where cookie tracking and attribution are becoming more challenging. It allows you to defend your budget by accurately reporting on performance, rather than just relying on default attribution windows.

8. Contribution to Pipeline or Revenue: The Bottom Line

At the end of the day, contribution to pipeline or revenue is the ultimate measure of your PPC campaign’s success. If you can’t tie your ad spend to actual business outcomes—whether it’s qualified pipeline or closed revenue—then you’re essentially throwing money at a wall and hoping it sticks.

Successful PPC campaigns go beyond clicks and conversions. The best PPC professionals show the contribution their campaigns make to the sales pipeline and demonstrate how much of the closed revenue can be directly attributed to their paid media efforts. By bridging the gap between ad clicks and real business results, you can prove the true value of your PPC campaigns to senior leadership.

Bonus Metric: Campaign Health Metrics

While the focus has shifted to these deeper, more strategic KPIs, it’s important not to completely discard the traditional metrics like CTR, CPC, and CPM. These still serve a purpose—they’re health metrics that provide valuable diagnostics. For example:

• A strong CTR indicates relevant ad copy and healthy engagement.
• A reasonable CPC signals competitive efficiency.
• CPM can highlight shifts in inventory or competition.

These metrics are still useful for fine-tuning campaigns, but they shouldn’t be the headline numbers in your reports. The true value of PPC lies in its ability to drive revenue and business outcomes, not just surface-level engagement.

Conclusion: The Future of PPC KPIs

The landscape of PPC is rapidly evolving, and so should the way we measure its success. By focusing on profit, incrementality, LTV, and pipeline contribution, you’ll ensure that your campaigns are aligned with long-term growth, rather than short-term wins. It’s time to stop settling for outdated metrics and embrace the KPIs that truly move the needle.

As the digital marketing world becomes more complex, those who adapt to these modern PPC KPIs will not only improve their results—they’ll gain the respect of their leadership teams, secure larger budgets, and drive sustainable business growth.