Wednesday, October 14, 2009

How To Monitor Results With Pay Per Click

By William R. King

Online marketing is now essential for businesses as the internet becomes more integrated in our daily lives. Pay per click advertising is one of the most effective form of online advertising today. PPC campaigns draw traffic from search engines by displaying ads relevant to what is being searched. When clicked, these ads take visitors to a sales page or landing page.

There are many pay per click publishers operating today, however Google Adwords is currently the most popular service and has the most market share. PPC is run in a fast-paced medium wherein information can be accessed instantaneously. This allows you to monitor your ads performance and quickly implement tweaks to increase their effectiveness.

Raw numbers from traffic counts are the basis of measuring ad effectiveness, and will tell you exactly what types of visitors are arriving at your site. While this data will only give you an overview of the total volume of traffic, you will be able to drill down the dates of these traffic counts and match them up to the days that your ad campaigns were run.

Probably the most important data that you have to monitor are your conversion rates. A conversion rate is the ratio between the number of clicks on your ads and how many sales resulted from those clicks. Your conversion rates will determine the cost of how much it will cost you before generating a sale.

Author Joseph Thornton, of the book "The Online Advertising Playbook", states that conversion can also be in the form of a customer signing-up for your news letter, disclosing of contact information, or even downloading a free product from your site.

Another way to measure the effectiveness of a PPC campaign is to analyze different keywords and keyphrases as they relate to conversion rates. If you are able to drill down exactly which keywords and keyphrases are leading to a sale, you can optimize your website for these words and also use the data for future campaigns.

Lastly, you need to determine the ad rankings within your industry. This help you decide which type of ad placement you will avail. Most ad networks offer two options on ad placement: a regular spot and a featured or special spot. Google Adwords offers something similar. They place the regular ads on the sidebar column and rotates them to give everyone a fair exposure. They also offer the more expensive "Featured Ads" placement.

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