Paid SEO Marketing Metrics - More Than Counting Your Money
By Gregory Smyth
If you've set up a compelling, thorough, expert pay per click campaign, you'll already be seeing substantial traffic increases flowing to your site, and new customers and conversions. There is a heady wave to ride at the beginning of a PPC internet marketing campaign launch - but after that natural peak dies off, you need to start paddling again if you don't want to get dragged out to sea! The first step towards monitoring your results and continually improving them is to put in place a website analytics system, metrics to measure and tools for doing so. We show you how.
Part of setting up a well thought-out campaign knows what you want from it - so you have probably done part of the work in this area already. You should already know what goals you have in mind for your PPC campaign. These should be clear and measureable items, so the metrics to measure them are intrinsically included in your goals. If you haven't set goals yet, the time is now! Think about exactly what you want from your paid SEO marketing: an increase in traffic, an increase in online sales, an increase in foot traffic based on the internet, or to reach a different demographic than you do currently. As part of your internet marketing goal, state exactly how much you want to increase your metric by, and within what time frame.
You'll need to begin a spreadsheet to chart the success of your PPC web marketing strategy, including all of the baseline figures for the metrics you will be measuring. Look at what the current value of your online sales is, your current traffic figures per week or month, and the number of physical customers you see in a week. An internet marketing Services Company can help you set up a website analytics program with the features you need, and train your company to monitor it yourself.
Common problems that arise as you build enough data for analysis include low click through rates (CTRs), where your ad was shown many times, but few people clicked on it. Landing pages are another specialist area of internet marketing that it pays to review if your measurements aren't showing a payoff from your campaign. Any changes that you make in light of these figures should be scientific and measured. Use A/B testing rather than making several changes at once. First-hand knowledge of what actually works for your business will be invaluable in the future.
If you are using Google AdWords, it is quite simple to set up A/B testing. You can simply insert a slight variation on an ad into the AdGroup for the keyword you are examining. Having only one AdGroup per keyword is preferred, although in some cases it simply isn't possible. When you open up your AdGroup, you can quickly see the difference between the two ads. If you have chosen Yahoo as your online marketing software provider, you will need to manually set up the A/B testing by running one ad, then another, for set periods of time and recording the results.