Pay-per-click – A great method to drive lots of visitors to your website that are interested in your products or services.

After the click – Understanding what those visitors are doing once they reach your website, specfically if they are not calling you or filling out a form.

5 reasons to track after the click:

1. The tracking cookie is saved on the visitor’s computer for 30 days after the visit so you can know if they click now and return to your website later.
2. Return on Investment (ROI) is the most important metric. Your cost per click or click through rate might be great, but unless you know how much you are making for every dollar you invest, the other metrics are useless.
3. You can expand on keywords that provide the most ROI and generate even more profit.
4. Keywords that contain a brand or company name may provide a lot of traffic, but when you track the ROI of these keywords you might find that they provide little to no profit.
5. After you know the visitors that are taking some kind of action on your website, you can then determine where your most active markets are located geographically and develop a campaign specifically targeting those buyers.

In order to track after the click activity (using Google Adwords) you will need to make use of the Conversion Tracking feature (pictured below).

The set up is really simple. The first step is to name your conversion action.

TIP: If your forms all send the same formated message and there is no way for you to tell where each specific form came from, it’s important be very specific when naming your conversion. In the example we named our conversion “Landing Page B Contact Form” because we have 4 different landing pages for this client and we want to know which page is getting more leads.

The rest of the setup is really straight forward so we’ll skip to the next page after you save the action and get your conversion code.

On this page you are presented with the code to place on your “thank you” page.

Read related blog posts about Search Engine Marketing

• Effective Landing Pages, 7 Tips
• What is Search Engine Marketing?
• How to do Keyword Research for Search Marketing
• What is Dynamic Keyword Insertion?
• What is Clickthrough Rate and Cost Per Click?
• How to make your Website more Trustworthy
• 4 Reasons why Traffic Quality is Important

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Great tips on how to use Google Analytics to get the most out of Google Adwords.

Google Analytics in 60 Seconds: Find the Best Keywords
Google Analytics in 60 Seconds: Location Targeting
Google Analytics in 60 Seconds: Find Poor Performing Campaigns and Keywords
Google Analytics in 60 Seconds: Placement Targeting
Google Analytics in 60 Seconds: Identifying High Spenders
Google Analytics in 60 Seconds: Conversion Funnels
Google Analytics in 60 Seconds: Tracking Ecommerce with Google Analytics

via Adwords blog

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Shortly after posting our explanation on Cost Per Click and Clickthrough Rate, Google posted a video of their chief economist, Hal Varian, explaining the AdWords Ad Auction and how your max CPC bid and quality score determine how much you pay for a click on Google.com.

Hal Varian makes some very interesting points about the basics of the AdWords advertising, but one little pie chart spoke volumes!

Take a good look at that pie chart. CTR is well over half the calculation in determining your ad quality (which directly effects how much you pay). Hal goes on to say that when a user clicks on an ad they are contributing feedback on the quality of the ads. Users vote by using their clicks. Making up the rest of the pie chart is relevancy, which is followed by the landing page.

So there you have it straight from Google themselves. Your clickthrough rate is extremely important to your campaign. And take note, your clickthrough rate is directly related to your keyword competitors, no advertisers’ CTR outside of your industry are going to effect your quality score. So don’t worry if you hear other industries boasting about high clickthrough rates. It has nothing to do with your ads.

Watch the video on YouTube

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Do you know the search marketing language?

Previous posts:
What is Search Engine Marketing?
What is Social Media Marketing?

CTR, CPC, PPC, ROI, DKI… It’s all pretty confusing when those crazy internet guys start talking in their foreign language. Let’s define (in plain English) two common terms in search marketing, Clickthrough Rate and Cost Per Click.

Clickthrough Rate (CTR) is obtained taking the number of people who clicked on an ad and dividing it by the number of times the ad was delivered (impressions). For example, if your ad had 2,500 impressions in one month and it received 194 clicks, it would have a CTR of 7.8% for that month.

It is important to know that different industries will have varying levels of successful CTR. What may be a high clickthrough rate in one industry may be considered low in another. So, it’s difficult to determine an average CTR for everyone. For large volume industries that get millions of nationwide searches a day, you may find that 2% is a great CTR. However some campaigns may find a CTR of 14% to be their benchmark.

The reason it’s important to strive for the best clickthrough rate is because the more people that find your ad to be relevant, the lower your cost per click will be (specifically citing Google Adwords ranking formula).

Cost Per Click (CPC) is the amount of money an advertiser pays search engines or other Internet publishers for a single click on its ad that brings one visitor to its website. This term is much easier to understand since it’s so straight forward. No formulas needed. Well… Let’s do one, just for fun.

Pretty simple, right? Cost per click is just how much you pay per visitor that comes to your site through an ad that you place on a search engine. You want this number to be as low as possible so you won’t be spending a fortune on your search engine marketing.

Still confused? Yell at us by leaving a comment below. We’ll answer your toughest questions or delete the comment.

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