Measure PPC Campaigns and Optimize

A lot of marketers and businesses are investing on PPC (Paid per Click) ads for various reason. Some of the reasons are obtaining higher traffic, promote certain pages, increase conversion through targeted users, etc.

Obviously, if you invest in PPC campaigns, you might want to know how it performed in many ways, so your money is well spent. You need to analyze it to understand the return on the investment.

WAA had an interesting article on 10 simple ways to use web analytics to optimize the PPC campaigns:

1) Traffic Volume & Conversion Rate Comparisons: Measure how many traffic you are obtaining via PPC and understand the conversion rate differences from various traffic sources. The good thing about PPC is that you have the option to take visitors to any landing pages so optimizing the landing page could be an option.

2) New Keyword Opportunities: Look into the keywords your visitors are using to come into the site and leverage those keywords into your PPC keywords strategies.

3) New Traffic Source Opportunities: Evaluate the conversion rate from different traffic sources, and look into opportunities to acquire traffic and qualified visitors from high converting traffic sources.

4) Budget Forecasting: Understand the balance between how much money you are paying to acquire traffic and conversions. Allocate the money wisely across different campaign levels to sustain and grow better conversions.

5) Segmenting User Behavior: Click path from different search engines may behave differently. Understand the difference between which keywords and path the visitors took to achieve higher conversion.

6) Identifying “Influencer Keywords”: Consumers search multiple times before making a purchase and refine those searches from generic keywords to more refined words. Use analytics to find out if they do indeed bring converting users, even if it’s for that initial introduction to the site.

7) Identifying Conversion Latency: Not everyone converts immediately. How many days pass before a visitor returns to convert? Therefore, don’t judge PPC success until the latency period has passed. Basically, know your audience sales cycle and build that into campaign expectations.

8) Finding Day-Part Opportunities: Certain time of the week may have a different conversion rate. Adjust PPC budget allocation according to the cycle.

9) Hot Products, Top Converters: With a limited budget and possibly thousands of product pages, be aware of the various metrics that are applicable to measure what really needs to be focused. (Product page visits, revenue/order size, profit margin, conversion rates, quantity of orders, etc.)

10) Landing Page Analysis/Bounce Rates: When there are multiple landing pages for the PPC campaigns, use A/B or multivariate tests to improve the landing page performances and ‘stickiness’ to reduce the bounces.
These are simple examples on how to approach what to measure and optimize for the PPC campaigns.

Source: http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/en/art/?484