Pay per click marketing is an important 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 PPC campaign is a relatively simple process, but it does require some basic knowledge about how SEO and PPC work, and access to web analytics tools. Here are some simple ways to measure how effective PPC campaigns are:
1. Integrate PPC in your web analytics tool. Avinash Kaushik, author of the book "Web Analytics: An Hour a Day" suggests using several web analytics tools and integrating the PPC data into it to measure how effective your campaign is. The author points out that it is necessary to get access to the backend of your analytics tools so that you know exactly what is going on behind the scenes (instead of hiring an SEM agency to do it for you as a service).
2. Determine the key performance indicators. The second question you have to address is what exactly generates a 'sale' for you? Is it the click to your sales page (a lead capture)? Is it the payment and transaction itself? Determining what is the KPI for a particular campaign helps you limit your focus and monitor user behavior that's getting the sales you need.
3. Monitor the unique visitors. Unique visitor counts varies substantially by campaign, and you'll have to know exactly the amount of money it'll cost you to get all these visitors, even if they did not finish a purchase or submit their information. The main reason why it's important is simply because you have to know if the campaign is working. If people are only clicking through to your site but not converting, then you may be targeting the wrong keywords.
4. Do a split test. Split testing is actually a typical technique used by internet marketers who want to determine which keywords or keyphrases perform better for conversions in their given market. Split testing means operating similar ad across all 3 advertising service providers at the same time. This method allows you to track clicks and find out where most of your target audience is clicking as well as how they are finding you. When you already have this data, you will be able to concentrate all your advertising work specifically on the network that has the most return.
5. Decide on your cost per acquisition. Once you find out the number of visitors coming over to your site, and how many people are converting, you will be able to get an exact assessment of the cost per acquisition for your campaign. This will be the exact dollar amount it will take to get a sale. After that, you will be able to compute the average selling price as well as take a closer look at your return on investment (ROI).
Determining the effectiveness of your pay per click marketing strategy may take some time, and you will need to tweak it as you go along. Still, it's a process that every savvy marketer needs to go through in order to optimize their ads and get the highest conversions from each and every PPC campaign.
