Pay per click advertising like that of Google Adwords is an vital part of your online marketing strategy, but how do you know if what you are doing is getting any results? Learning how to measure the effectiveness of Pay per click campaigns is a relatively simple process but it does require some basic knowledge about how SEO and Pay per click works, and access to web analytics tools. Here are some simple ways to measure the effectiveness of Pay per click campaigns like Google Adwords:
1. Integrate Pay per click with your web analytics tool. Avinash Kaushik, author of the book "Web Analytics: An Hour a Day" recommends using several web analytics tools and integrating your Pay per click data into it to measure the effectiveness of your campaign. Kaushik points out that it is important to have access to the backend of your analytics tools so you know exactly what is happening behind the scenes, instead of paying an SEM agency to do this for you as a service.
2. To define the key performance indicators. Take the time to analyze what exactly generates income? Is it the click to a sales page or a lead capture? Was it the outright purchase of an product or digital assets? Defining what is the performance indicator for your particular campaign will help you narrow down your focus and track user behavior that is getting the conversions you need.
3. Keep track of your unique visitors. Unique visitor counts will vary significantly by campaign, and you will need to know exactly how much it cost to attract these visitors, even if they didn't complete a purchase or submit their information. Knowing this will clearly indicate the real score. If people are only clicking through to the site but not converting, you may be targeting the wrong keywords.
4. To do a split test. This test is usually done by internet savvy marketers to aid them in figuring out what are the keywords or keyphrases that work the best for conversions from their prospective market. Split testing means running the same ad across all three ad service providers at the same time. The data results that you can gather from a split test are click tracking, where most of the clicks are coming from, and how your target market finds your site. With this data in hand, it will possible to assess the performance of each service provider, and work exclusively with the one that gives you the best results.
5. To find out the cost per acquisition. The data gathered from your Pay per click advertising will give you an accurate count on home many people come to visit the site and how many are converting, and this can be used to figure out exactly how much is your cost per acquisition for a particular campaign. You will be able to get exactly how much is spent to generate a sale. After that, you will be able to calculate the average selling price and take a close look at your ROI.
Measuring the effectiveness of your Pay per click marketing strategy can take time and you will need to tweak it as you go along. These 5 steps will help you enormously in optimizing your ads and getting the highest conversions from each and every campaign. The fact is, that these are just the very simplest and most basic techniques. If you would like to truly maximize the income that you get from your website, you would have to find other marketing strategies like what Google Advertising can provide.
