With any Pay per Click (PPC) campaign driving traffic to a site is of course an
important objective, however, how much do you pay for this traffic? How much is
each visitor to the site worth? PPC campaigns and sponsored campaigns can be an
easy way to attain immediate lift in your online visibility and cruise to the
first page of the search engine results. However, the costs of PPC campaigns can
quickly escalate and without a proper analytics system in place to measure the
effect of your advertising spend, your campaign could become a money losing
proposition. This is especially important in business-to-business (B2B) lead
generation sites: how much is a lead worth? How many visits to a lead
conversion?
Selection of keywords is important in determining the budget required for PPC as
the number of keywords and the search volume for those keywords will determine
the amount of clicks your PPC campaign will get. For the inexperienced or
undisciplined in managing PPC campaigns can quickly see their entire budget
eaten up without yielding significant or any return or a single lead. Before an
advertiser ventures on a PPC campaign, it is important to invest in analytics
software for the site. A good analytics program such as Omniture’s SiteCatalyst
will enable a site operator to see what traffic the site has been generating and
the sources the traffic has been generated from. Additionally, software such as
Omniture will enable a PPC manager to measure the success of their campaign and
tie it directly back to the keyword level, allowing an advertiser to see
precisely what keywords are generating the conversions.
Several companies set forth with the goal of generating traffic to the website
to increase sales, however, as we have mentioned this can be a costly scenario.
With the implementation of any business venture, a clear idea of the expected
results is required and goals should already be established. What is it that you
want your prospect to do once they are on your site? Far too often companies
simply link their PPC campaigns to their home pages and hope that the visitor
will stumble across the proper conversion paths. With a PPC campaign an
opportunity presents itself to measure effectively which keywords are converting
more traffic than others and maximize the effectiveness of the campaign by
eliminating words which are generating traffic and no conversions, however an
adequate analytics program is necessary to be able to deliver this information.
A good analytics program will also add campaign metrics such as time spent per
PPC visitor, content visited after landing page and other site conversions to
add more detailed information when determining the effectiveness of your PPC
campaign. Time spent on the site is a measure of site interaction as well as the
content and pages viewed after the landing page. This information is useful in
determining the purchase behaviour of the user and enables you to tailor more
content specifically for that user segment. Other downloaded information or
products sold can also count as conversions in sites such as a lead generating
site or a B2B site where the sales process tends to be more complicated and
longer.
With a transactional revenue model for the site this equation becomes very easy,
simple determine how many visitors the site gets and the total revenue the site
has generated and you will have the revenue per visitor. The revenue per visitor
is an important number to diagnose due to the impact it will have on your PPC/Sponsored
Campaigns. Revenue value per visitor will help to determine the maximum you can
bid on a keyword before running a loss. The site value per customer can be
calculated simply by the following formula:
Total Site Revenue /
Total number of Visitors = Revenue/ Visitor
When determining what keywords to bid on and how much to bid for position,
keeping the site value per customer in mind will allow you to implement a PPC
campaign to bring profitable traffic to your site. This dollar amount also
enters into the equation once the analytics program has been implemented as
keywords which are costing more than the average revenue per unique visitor will
negatively affect the PPC campaign’s ROI. Moreover, individual keywords can be
analyzed in much the same fashion by determining the revenue generated from the
particular keyword and the cost per click. Should the revenue per click be less
than the cost per click, the keyword should be examined for relevancy, how
general it is, how the keyword fits into the purchase decision process (see
articles on
keywords that work), and the landing page optimization. If nothing
can be done to increase the revenue generated from the keyword it should be
eliminated from the campaign.
Pay-per-click campaigns are amazingly effective at driving targeted traffic to a
site and are driving traffic to a particular page aimed at convincing the user
to convert along a specific path within the website. However, to ensure your
campaign is achieving its maximum potential an analytics program needs to be in
place to ensure budgets are allocated to keywords with the highest ROI and
statistics can be linked directly to the campaign’s performance. |
enquiro research
Kyle
Grant