So, this is where you will end up when you start your account, as you can see, there are no live campaigns over here, but we don't need to worry about having any campaigns live. First of all, we need to go through what are all of these columns, which ones are important, which ones are not so important and which ones are the most important, which you must look at because this is kind of like a cockpit of a jumbo jet plane. You got so many bells and whistles. You will get confused very easily. So, I'm going to simplify this and then also explain what each one of these metrics means and why should you bother with these. Now, what you want to do is, first of all, when you come in here and you don't see any columns and then you might think that my dashboard is different from somebody else's. No, because you can show the column or you can hide these columns. All you need to do, first of all, go into these, columns and you can see that you can make different column sets. I have a column set for conversion, video views with your campaign or display campaign because the metrics for a video campaign are different from a search campaign or to pay campaign. So, you can have a different column set and save it. You click on it, it's going to load up those... Column set. I'm going to modify my column.
This is where you get everything you can see and read in Google Ads. Now, this one is fairly new, but recommended columns, which is for the best strategy type or the optimization, oh I don't want that... Let's start with the performance. This is where we start. Clicks, I don't need to explain, but if you do need any explanation, all you need to do is to hold the mouse on that word and you will see the description of that. The thing with these metrics, is again, quite confusing because interactions are pretty much clicked, but it's different kinds of ads. Now coming out all the time in Google, it may be that the interaction is not a click, but it could be a video view because somebody has interacted with your ad, or it could be a Gmail ad where somebody has opened it up and expanded the ad.
So, that's also an interaction, but they did not come through to the website, but then you just need to make sure which one you want to go with. Most of the time, you just want this click and so I'm going to just check the boxes, which I believe in my humble opinion are the bare minimum you should have on your default interface. Then, we have the cost, which is, you must see all the time, how much you're spending on Google. So again, that is self-explanatory. Impressions are how many times your ads have been shown on... That's the number of impressions and you want the impressions to be as high as possible or your targeted keywords and the audience and because if you don't have the impressions, you will not get the clicks. You will not have a click-through rate. You will not have a conversion rate or cost per conversion.
Nobody's coming through to the website, interactions, engagement, engagement rate. It's entirely up to you, whether you want to keep it or not. But if you are, we're just going to talk about the search campaign for the time being. We'll keep things extremely simple. I wouldn't bother with these for the time being. You can keep an eye out on invalid clicks and you'll see that Google will automatically refund you the money for the clicks in your billing section. Don't need to see, but if you find that you are getting a lot of invalid clicks, then you need to investigate further, definitely average cost per click, CPC, meaning the cost per click. So, how much you are paying every time someone clicks on your ad, CPE is the cost per engagement. You don't need to worry too much about it. CPM is the cost per thousand impressions. That's for a video campaign, how many dollars or pounds you are paying per thousand views.
So, that's what I said. You can have different sets of your columns or different types of campaigns. So, for a video campaign, I would have something like a CPM, CPV, which is the cost per view, and those kinds of metrics. Then, you've got your average, CPC over here, which is fine. Now, if you are working on a target CPA, which is the cost per acquisition, but an acquisition could be anything. It could be a lead. It could be a subscriber to your newsletter, could be somebody signing up to an offer on a landing page, or whatever that call to action that you have set up as a conversion, but then you can have average target CPA, or for shopping campaigns, it's the target ROAS, which is the return on ad spend, how much money you are getting in return when you spend a dollar or a pound. Views are for video views, view rate, watch time.
These are all very important videos. metrics, especially, this metric, which is, up to what time someone viewed or played your video up to 25, 50, 75, or 100%. If you are running a video campaign and it says over here video only, this is one of the most important metrics, which I always look at, because if my video is, let's say 10 minutes, people are switching off after watching less than 25%, that means they're getting bored. The content is not engaging enough. They're not interested anymore, they're intrigued and interested at the beginning to find out what this video is all about, but I could not hold their attention. So, you need to make sure that when you are creating long-form videos, that it is interesting and you are holding someone's attention for as long as possible. Obviously, not everybody will be watching your videos for the whole duration, but you want that to be as high as possible.
This is for display impressions. Absolute top. Sorry. This is for the search campaign as well. How many times we absolute top... I'm going to talk about that in the competitive metrics in a bit, but from this performance column, I would say, for the search campaign, you've got these CTR, the click-through rate. That's also important. Let me make sure I haven't missed any. Yeah, so these are the three and six would definitely pick up, if one metric or you want to reorganize these columns or the metrics and if I don't want a bid strategy type, I can exit out it will ... memorization come out. Rearrange and reorganize them. So, first, the way I go from the top. So, I want the impressions to be the first column because, without impressions, nothing else happens, after the impressions, I get the click, then I have average CPC cost.
Because clicks times average CPC will cost. Invalid click. Click through rate somewhere I can... It really doesn't matter. There's no hard and fast rule as to in which order you should put these in. Whichever is more comfortable. Viewability is mainly for video campaigns. I'm not going to go in there. Now, these are extremely important conversions, cost per conversion, conversion rate. These are the three metrics you got to keep an eye on these three metrics because all these other ones are fine, but this is where the buck stops. This is the bottom line. I don't care if I've got a great CTR in a low CPC, or I'm getting millions of impressions. But if these three are not working for me and the rest is completely irrelevant and you will find that you will run out of cash...you've got to get these conversions, then you've got lots of other ones over here as well. Conversion value over cost. This is the ROAS, the return on ad spend number.
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