PPC What is Worth Tracking
High Rankings Advisor: Jill Whalen calls upon "Ed Kohler the president of Haystack In A Needle again to answer the questions about tracking paid campaigns, especially conversions. "The situation is that: "The client is currently very successful online (over $1 million/month in sales) and is relatively new to pay-per-click advertising. They're receiving over 7,000 visitors/month through PPC ads, at an average of $0.11 per click, but haven't tracked conversions yet. I've proposed using the free conversion tracking tools provided through Overture and Google, but my client's IT staff balked at the idea and provided some WebTrends reports tracking the top-10 pathways of each ad, which didn't show any sales or even visits to the shopping cart."
Ed sums up thus "It sounds like your biggest challenge is dealing with a client who is asking for performance information that their own IT department fails to provide. Your client appears to be at a point where they're seeing some great results online, but want some reinforcement to help justify the money they're spending on pay-per-click advertising...
In situations like this, it's important to educate the client about what kind of information is (or should be) available to them. Once they realize that they should know how much money they're making on their PPC advertising investment, there is no turning back"
In answer he begins: "While there is virtually no limit to what you can track in a pay-per-click campaign, there are a handful of reports that are almost always must-haves. Here's a quick summary of a few popular reportsthat will give you and your client actionable data:
Pay-per-click Reporting Wish List:
1. Return on Ad Spend - Take the revenue the client's site generates divided by the PPC ad spend over a given timeframe to get a feel for
whether you're profiting from your campaign.
2. Cost per Conversion - How much are you spending to generate a sale, lead, contact, or subscribe?
1 and 2 will likely cover the reporting needs of most clients. However, you'll probably need more information to manage their campaigns. Here are a few more must-have reports for PPC marketers:
3. Revenue Report - How much money are you making per ad?
4. Search Term Conversions - How much money are you making per search term from PPC and organic searches? Take phrases that
convert like crazy through natural results and add them to your PPC campaigns to bring in even more of that high-quality traffic. (NB This assumes that organic results have been tracked..)
5. Bounce Report - Measure what ads are generating a lot of back-button clicks. This is a good way to identify under-performing search terms.
6. 404 Error Report - Nothing kills a PPC campaign's performance faster than driving traffic to pages that no longer exist. In the case of online stores, this can happen when products go out of stock, are discontinued, or are moved to a different category. A 404 report will help you identify the changes the IT department forgot to tell you about.
Some of this data can be tracked using Overture's and Google's free tools. However, reports such as #2 are not available through O's
& G's free tools, yet are fairly critical to running a professional PPC campaign.
If you think you have a problem with click fraud he recommends picking up a subscription to WhosClickingWho
posted by Jen @ 10:20 AM
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