When it comes to a pay per click campaign or marketing one thing we are certain of is it never has a shortage of, it’s things to measure. There also seems to be an abundance of words we use to describe these measures, so you have your CTRs, CPCs, and ROIs.

You should be thankful to have them because without them it would be much more difficult to run a pay per click campaign.

understanding ROAS in your pay per click campaign
When creating your pay per click campaign you are “forced” into studying PPC communities jargon, with words such as ROI, CTR, ROAS, CPA, etc

Return on ad spend is one such metric hidden behind an acronym — ROAS. Advertisers use it to determine how effective their ads were from a specific pay per click campaign, Google Ads use it for a type of automated bidding, and fraudsters can target your ROAS just like any other metric.

What Is a ROAS pay per click campaign and How to Calculate It?

Before you can appreciate how malevolent actors can target your ROAS and affect the success of your ad campaign, you need to understand what ROAS is, how you calculate it, and how Google sees it.

The usual business-centric way of looking at advertising is through the metric of return on investment, or ROI. With a pay per click campaign, ROI lets you calculate how many business profits from a business activity relative to the costs of that activity to achieve that conversion-sale.

ROAS is simpler. It just shows you how much money you would get for the money invested in advertising. You can calculate it by dividing the revenue you get from ads by the money these ads cost.

So, if you earned $5,000 from $1,000-worth of ads, the ROAS is 5 — you get $5 for every dollar invested, or a 500% return. This is how we determine ROAS on a pay per click campaign.

ROAS and Google Ads Automated Bidding with Your Pay Per Click Campaign (PPC)

In some cases with a pay per click campaign, it makes more sense to choose ROAS as the key metric. In that case, CTR becomes less relevant, as the only thing that counts is how much return an advertising dollar makes. Of course, choosing ROAS as the key metric is something only experienced marketers should do.

For their part, Google Ads allows you to use ROAS as a goal in its automated bidding offer. Just as you can target search page location or maximize clicks through bidding, you can also target a specific ROAS. You will need to report conversion values to Google Ads, and they will use those values to set the maximum cost per click to reach your target ROAS.

Keeping Your ROAS Pay Per Click Campaign Safe from Fraud

PPC ads are never impervious to fraud, and ROAS campaigns are not an exception. You need to have a great level of control over your budget and expenditures for a campaign to meet its ROAS goals. ROAS is tied to two numbers, and ad expenditure is one of them.

Click fraud can influence the ad expenditure of your pay per click campaign. Click fraud has become incredibly sophisticated these days, to the point when it can mimic the behaviour of real potential customers to drive down your ROAS and burn through your budget quickly.

ClickGUARD is aware of this — our fraud protection tool is the thing you need to keep your ads safe from click frauds. We can’t say that we know how the minds of the people trying to defraud you work, but ClickGUARD knows where to look for their tracks, and what to do so that they don’t appear again.

Don’t let anyone defraud you or take advantage of your lack of time or technical expertise to deal with this — sign up for ClickGUARD now and give your ads a fighting chance.