It’s a fact, PPC professionals need good detective skills. You could say that PPC Management is a lot like being a detective only with statistical analysis. PPC performance can be affected by many variables with one of the most common being leakage, an important factor which can make or break a successful PPC campaign. Sleuthing through all the data to eliminate leakage is a must for all PPC professionals.
We all know that a strong campaign structure is the foundation on which successful PPC campaigns are built on. Keyword research can be monotonous and requires many steps, from the original ideas to supporting data, using keyword tools, and ultimately planning and sorting for Ad Group/Campaign structure, so should only be done once the original build is proven out.
Its imperative to establish a benchmark Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) for measuring the success of the initial campaign structure and keywords before the second phase of building out keywords begins.
Whether an Acquisition on your website is measured by an online sale or a lead, such as a form fill or phone call is not important, just make sure you measure them allOtherwise your CPA could be significantly wrong.
It’s a common question asked by PPC professionals – ‘why aren't we converting when we know we’re driving traffic to websites?’ well if you have asked yourself this question then before you start re-structure or building out your campaign further, make sure you are measuring all touch points on your site.
Once you have done this then you can get a accurate CPA that gives you a benchmark to further build out your campaign.
With your on page touch points such as form fills, email links, live chat etc, make sure you tracking them using an analytics package, so each interaction can be tracked back to the keyword level. Same goes for if you have a phone number on your site, make sure it too can be linked back to the PPC keyword that drove the visitor to the site.
Now there are many analytics package that you can use to track on site touch points such as Google Analytics but measuring phone calls to keyword level is a little more tricky.
The most effective way of achieving this is to use Visitor level call tracking which is can link each visitor and subsequent call they may make back to the exact keyword that brought them to your site in the first place.
Implementing call tracking along side your PPC Campaign allows you attribute calls to the correct keywords which means you can bid more aggressively on the keywords that work and reduce bids on the keywords that don’t.