Use PPC tracking analysis understand your visitors and optimize your content

Use web tracking tools and reports that show you how many individual visitors came to your site, as well as hit counts to understand which pages of your web site are the most popular, and which pages draw little traffic. Understanding such statistics as unique visitors and page hits, you can review your site structure and content intelligently, and you can optimize your content so visitors will click through to the pages of your site where you want them. Pay-per-click tracking analysis also enables you to view top referring sites, top referring URLs and most popular search phrases, all forms of more specific feedback that will help you gauge how in tune your content is with what your visitors are looking for.

Take a methodological approach to PPC campaign analysis and Return on Investment (ROI).

If you are trying to leverage your web presence to increase your bottom line, you need to know the exact effectiveness of each pay per click campaign that you launch. Collecting and interpreting key statistics will provide immediate results and feedback, and this pay per click tracking analysis will help you better adjust your approach to all kinds of online activities. The statistics that you should collect include: cost of each campaign, campaign reach (or total visits or “eyeballs”), number of unique visits, click-through number, click-through percentage, number of leads generated, and number of sales generated. These metrics will help you calculate your cost per lead, lead conversion rate, and lead to sales ratio, all of which will help you determine which campaigns are helping – or hurting – your bottom line.

Use Single Access Page tracking to drive visitors to the content that they are looking for.

Your pay per click campaign could be undermined by ineffective landing pages, so PPC management should include tracking Single Access Pages, or pages that a visitor views and then leaves without exploring any further - most often, the home page. To help ensure that the visitors you want at your site move beyond your home page, consider arranging content by visitor – such as members, prospective members, journalists, consumers, etc. – so the home page engages them and sends them to the appropriate inside pages. Also note that while a splash home page can be visually appealing, these often show large single access figures because impatient or skeptical surfers leave them prior to entering the site.

Iterate to improve your PPC campaign, and grow based on positive results.

Once you have created your initial PPC campaign and have been able to capture and track the number of visitors it generates, their conversion rate, et cetera, with web site tracking tools then you will have a better perspective on what about your campaign really works, and where you might be able to “trim some fat.” Based on that information, you can build more campaigns to attract your potential customers. Moreover, because ads earn their position based on performance and per-click cost, a strong performance history could mean that you will end up paying less to maintain the position of your ads.

Set informed and realistic PPC goals, and track and analyze based on those goals.

Thousands of “hits” are neither the universal goal nor a necessarily meaningful metric for your pay-per-click tracking analysis. Because “hits” refers to each piece of a site that is downloaded, including all graphics files, the hits metric might help you identify how much information visitors are viewing, but it will not help you gauge how many unique visitors there are to your site. Therefore, when you set goals for your PPC campaign, try to set a unique visitor goal. Moreover, decide if you want to optimize your pay-per-click campaign for volume or for “qualified” visitors. Depending on what you use your web site for, the balance between indiscriminate and qualified viewers may change over time. Pay Per Click Management and pay-per-click tracking analysis tools will help you identify visitors and what they do so that you can gauge the effectiveness of your campaign at a moment in time and over time.