In effective search marketing campaigns, the more experienced business aims to minimize its PPC spend and maximize the results. The first thing towards achieving dual success as described is you need to install some analytics tools. The best place to start for now since it is free is www.google.com/analytics.

It takes literally five minutes to set up. and once you have it set up, you can start seeing your daily traffic in terms of where people came from and what they did on your site.

The best part about analytics is that today the results are instant. you can run a campaign of adwords for an hour and measure the exact results in the same hour. so not only can you see which ADS (through Google or Yahoo) are producing clicks into your site (plus you can see how many impressions occur of each ad as compared to the number of clicks - this is called CTR, click through ratio, and will be covered in another post) you can then follow the clicks THROUGH YOUR SITE and see which visitors take specific actions on your site.

Stay tuned where I share some strategies for running more efficient PPC campaigns. I will start by highlighting things you can do MANUALLY and soon I will be sharing some case studies and recommendations of software that will automate much of the process.

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It used to be that clicks could be purchased for pennies per click. Even with the insanely high fraud rates of 30-40%, it still was worth it to buy as much traffic as you could afford. In the last few years, the costs have skyrocketed. And as more people become web savvy, the competition for those elusive top sponsored ads, becomes even more acute and thus the prices go up another notch.

When I began helping other clients develop their own 4 Pillar Internet Success strategies, I used to focus mostly on search engines. The traffic from them was basically free and therefore it made a lot of sense on how to dominate on free search engines. The funny thing is that as their rankings increased their traffic increased but their conversions did not move in sync. And the reason that made the most sense was the PPC ads on the top and right of Google for example. The heat map studies show that 7x as many people click on the free search engine rankings results as people who click on the ads.

That’s great if you have good rankings. Problem is that people tend to forget that 1 out of 7 people still click on Sponsored ads. So if you are willing to give away 14% or so of your business opportunities to your competition, then you can ignore PPC. But, if you want to take advantage of every business opportunity from a targeted prospect (remember the user typed in the query into the search engine because ostensibly he or she is looking for your service) then you need to buy sponsored PPC ads. So maybe this is counterintuitive but the point is that as your business grows and your rankings grow, so too will your PPC budget grow because 14% of the traffic will always click on the ADS.

What I intend to cover in this PPC section are strategies, case studies and applications designed to get the most out of your PPC budget.

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