What Are the Most Important PPC Metrics?

Our current subscribers to the Yield Web Marketing Suite will see a new feature when they log on today: the new Yield Customer Acquisition Funnel.  This groovy new feature is a very visual way to instantly see how each of your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns are doing.

We frequently get two key questions from folks regarding their PPC campaigns:

How can I tell if my campaign is doing well?

What are the metrics I should be paying attention to?

Depending on the campaign, the response is often not a simple one. And accurately concluding how your campaign is doing pivots off of what sort of results you want from your campaign.  Our system provides a variety of both simple and more complex reports to gain insight to these questions, but we heard from our customers that they wanted something a little more visual and easy-to-understand.

Because, of course, within the proper context, you can instantly see the answers you’re looking for.  Which is why we introduced our new Yield Customer Acquisition Funnel.

Folks often wade through a sea of metrics and opt to pick an easily-visible one to fret over – most often cost-per-click (CPC). Of course you want the most traffic at the lowest cost… That’s just plain logic, right?

But what if none of those cheap visitors stay on your site to check out what you have to offer? What if most of them never come back for another visit or never convert to a paying customer?

You can be the world champion at CPC optimization and easily end up with a campaign that’s a total failure.

That’s where the age-old concept of the marketing and sales funnel comes in.  For those who don’t know what this is, the funnel is a visualization of the prospects you bring to the table and the degree to which they pass through each phase of the funnel (or not).  The funnel can be a great tool for quickly seeing if you’re losing customers along the way and, ultimately, just how successful your campaign has been.

For those who know funnels, you also know they’ve been abused or misused, but in the case of PPC campaign measurement, it works perfectly to provide visual context so you can see how all those metrics fit together.  And it provides a solid answer to the question “How’s my PPC campaign performing?”  With a good funnel, you can instantly see your campaign’s exposure, interest, relevance and results. And you can easily see where problems are occurring and then make the necessary adjustments.  And we think ours is a very, very good funnel!

What Are the Best PPC Optimization Techniques?

But now that you can see just how well your campaigns are performing and where you may be losing folks in the funnel, you’re probably wondering what  adjustments you can make to get to improvements in performance. This leads us to the second most popular area of questioning: What are the best tips for me to improve my PPC campaign?

Alas, yet again, our answer is often: “It depends.” (Sigh.)

And, yet again, there’s no shortage of techniques to optimize your PPC campaigns. (Double-Sigh.)

Many experts are eager to share their proven tricks for PPC campaign optimization, but just like the metrics, these techniques are meaningless without impact context.

Different optimization strategies impact different aspects of a campaign. So, beyond just understanding campaign performance, you also need to understand which optimization techniques are the best to improve your specific areas of lackluster performance.

For example, throwing more money, keywords or ads at a campaign that has a high bounce rate isn’t the best place to start. Rather, you’ll want to take a look at adding negative keywords to your campaign to stop irrelevant clicks, for example, or put some work into your landing pages, or create a campaign-specific landing page rather than sending users to your home page.

But there’s no need to play at guessing games.  The Yield Customer Acquisition Funnel also highlights a variety of optimization recommendations available to you at the specific points on the funnel where your campaign performance is less than stellar.  Click on the links directly below any particular funnel metric and you’ll see tips and strategies you can use to help improve the key metric in question.

The sales and marketing funnel is familiar to most marketing professionals but it may nevertheless be new to you.  Whichever category you fall in to, our new Yield Customer Acquisition Funnel will answer two of the most important questions you can ask:

1) How is your PPC campaign performing?

2) What you can do to further improve PPC performance?

Want a glimpse but not already a subscriber? Try our free for 15-day trial and see if you can take your campaign to the next level.

Unlike outdoor advertising (i.e. billboards) or radio and television ads, where precise correlations to ROI can be elusive, search engine marketing (SEM) enables marketers to track interactions and behavior at every step of engagement.

Though a huge number of web marketing professionals employ display advertising on sites like NYTimes.com or FOXNews.com or Yahoo!, a growing share of marketing dollars are being directed to the search engines and specifically pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.  By buying the “Sponsored Links” you see on search result pages on Google, Yahoo Search or Microsoft Live Search, marketers are able to track: (a) clicks on an ad link; (b) arrival at a website’s landing page; (c) what visitors do once on the site; and (d) whether or not that visitor converts to a paying customer, among many other possibilities.

Such tracking is typically achieved by using a third-party analytics package in your website.  Such packages range from free and easy-to-install (i.e., Google Analytics) to quite complex and powerful systems that are very expensive and time-consuming to implement.  If you’re a small or growing business, Google Analytics is a great tracking package that will give you much of what you need and is very easy to implement simply by following their detailed instructions.

Once a visitor converts to a paying customer, web marketers are able to do an ROI analysis on that particular individual and across all customers who similarly converted to paying customers from the same campaign.  By comparing the total amount spent to acquire customers through a web marketing campaign to the amount of revenue generated by those who clicked on links and converted to paying customers, a campaign ROI can be quickly calculated.

Obviously, most web marketers want to make at least one more dollar than it cost to execute the campaign.  And, there are some instances where web marketers will make well-calculated decisions to arrive at a negative ROI in order to achieve their campaign objectives (for instance, you might decide that acquiring a large volume of new traffic within a tight timeframe, even if there is a negative ROI, is the right long-term strategy for your site).  But ideally, campaigns will perform much better than either of these scenarios and the degree to which a campaign’s ROI is impressive or not will have much to do with a number of factors.  These include:

Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaign Management.  Achieving excellent placement in the Sponsored Links sections of search results pages is a holy grail of search marketers.  There are a number of factors that ensure a PPC campaign is well managed and optimized for the best outcomes.  These include keyword lists, bid management, geo-targeting choices, product pricing and promotion decisions, etc.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  While it is important to actively and accurately manage paid search campaigns, it is equally as important to ensure websites rank high in natural (or organic) search results.  Clicks on these links are free to the advertiser and can effectively lower the overall cost of a web marketing campaign when averaged with paid customer acquisition.  By effectively optimizing a website for search engines, web marketers can ensure the same paid links appear high up in natural (and therefore free) search results.

Landing Page Optimization (LPO).  Clicks from both paid and natural search results must resolve to a web page that is optimized for converting first-time or returning visitors into paying customers, which is why LPO is of such great importance to search marketing.  And, LPO is also concerned with keeping the sales cycle as short as possible.  There are both simple and sophisticated ways to manage how such pages are optimized—either dynamically or in limited tests.  Landing pages can be the homepage of a website, but more experienced web marketers will typically create a specialized landing page that ties directly to the links that generated the clicks in the first place.

Anyone interested in embarking on a web marketing campaign should do so with a measurement plan in mind.  Being able to justify the time and expense of such efforts is critical in understanding the best ways in which to attract and profitably retain customers.

So time for a Small Plug: our Yield Web Marketing Suite is a fully automated and fully integrated set of powerful modules to enable you to easily set up and manage your web marketing efforts.  And to effectively measure the ROI on your efforts.  It’s ideal for small businesses and those with limited marketing resources.  Even more sophisticated web marketers use Yield Software to make the management and tracking of campaigns fast, easy and profitable.

For more information about our Yield Web Marketing Suite, go here.

To see more blog posts in our Introduction to Web Marketing Series, go here.

Unlike outdoor advertising (i.e. billboards) or radio and television ads, where precise correlations to ROI can be elusive, search engine marketing (SEM) enables marketers to track interactions and behavior at every step of engagement.

Though a huge number of web marketing professionals employ display advertising on sites like NYTimes.com or FOXNews.com or Yahoo!, a growing share of marketing dollars are being directed to the search engines and specifically pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.  By buying the “Sponsored Links” you see on search result pages on Google, Yahoo Search or Microsoft Live Search, marketers are able to track: (a) clicks on an ad link; (b) arrival at a website’s landing page; (c) what visitors do once on the site; and (d) whether or not that visitor converts to a paying customer.

Once a visitor converts to a paying customer, web marketers are able to do an ROI analysis on that particular individual and across all customers who similarly converted to paying customers from the same campaign.  By comparing the total amount spent to acquire customers through a web marketing campaign to the amount of revenue generated by those who clicked on links and converted to paying customers, a campaign ROI can be quickly calculated.

Obviously, most web marketers want to make at least one more dollar than it cost to execute the campaign.  And, there are some instances where web marketers will make well-calculated decisions to arrive at a negative ROI in order to achieve their campaign objectives (for instance, you might decide that acquiring a large volume of new traffic within a tight timeframe, even if there is a negative ROI, is the right long-term strategy for your site).  But ideally, campaigns will perform much better than either of these scenarios and the degree to which a campaign’s ROI is impressive or not will have much to do with a number of factors.  These include:

Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaign Management.  Achieving excellent placement in the Sponsored Links sections of search results pages is a holy grail of search marketers.  There are a number of factors that ensure a PPC campaign is well managed and optimized for the best outcomes.  These include keyword lists, bid management, geo-targeting choices, product pricing and promotion decisions, etc.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  While it is important to actively and accurately manage paid search campaigns, it is equally as important to ensure websites rank high in natural (or organic) search results.  Clicks on these links are free to the advertiser and can effectively lower the overall cost of a web marketing campaign when averaged with paid customer acquisition.  By effectively optimizing a website for search engines, web marketers can ensure the same paid links appear high up in natural (and therefore free) search results.

Landing Page Optimization (LPO).  Clicks from both paid and natural search results must resolve to a web page that is optimized for converting first-time or returning visitors into paying customers.  And, LPO is also concerned with keeping the sales cycle as short as possible.  There are both simple and sophisticated ways to manage how such pages are optimized—either dynamically or in limited tests.  Landing pages can be the homepage of a website, but more experienced web marketers will typically create a specialized landing page that ties directly to the links that generated the clicks in the first place.

Anyone interested in embarking on a web marketing campaign should do so with a measurement plan in mind.  Being able to justify the time and expense of such efforts is critical in understanding the best ways in which to attract and profitably retain customers.  So time for a Small Plug: our Yield Web Marketing Suite is a fully automated and fully integrated set of powerful modules to enable you to easily set up and manage your web marketing efforts.  And to effectively measure the ROI on your efforts.  It’s ideal for small businesses and those with limited marketing resources.  Even more sophisticated web marketers use Yield Software to make the management and tracking of campaigns fast, easy and profitable.

For more information about our Yield Web Marketing Suite, go here.

To see more blog posts in our Introduction to Web Marketing Series, go here.