by Mirago

The key focus for any paid search campaign should be to generate as much quality traffic as cost efficiently as possible and to ensure it will convert at the best possible rate.

It is important to review and learn from your campaigns in order to continue achieving optimum success. Online is unique in its ability to offer real-time tracking and measurement but the wealth of data can be overwhelming so it is important to keep your focus clearly on your KPIs and being clear what you want to measure. For example- what will you class as a conversion? A conversion could mean a click on a reservations page, the completion of a sales enquiry form or downloading a company brochure. Once your key metrics are decided you can then turn your attention to ensure you have the appropriate online measurement solution to monitor them.

Identifying traffic

The most common objective of search campaigns is to drive more traffic to the website. To discover how people are finding your website you need to look at the "referrer" field in your web log files. This entry lists the page that a user was reading before arriving at your website. If there is no information in this field, typically represented by a dash, then the user most likely entered your URL by hand or clicked on a previously stored bookmark. If the user found your page through a search engine you will be able to identify that from this entry. If a high proportion of your traffic is coming from one search engine you should look to see if you are appearing in the other search engines for the same keywords.

This is the simplest form of monitoring and, when used well, enables you to easily determine the cost per lead by dividing your advertising spend for each search engine by the number of clicks generated.

User behaviour on your website

Your potential customer has arrived at your website via a search engine but what happens beyond this click? You can use ‘cookies’ or ‘sessions’ to monitor the journey of each user through your website and beyond this, a modified statistics script could then help you check the user journey by search engine referrer. If this is sounding too ‘techie’ then you can look into the comprehensive web analytics tools offered by companies such as Webtrends, ClickTracks, Websidestory, Google Analytics and Nedstat. These (mostly) paid services reveal much more than your basic site statistics and can monitor not just conversions but also the user path to sale. Understanding which pages users are responding to (or not) can help identify fundamental flaws in your website which could be reducing your Return on Investment (ROI). If a high percentage of users are exiting on a certain page this is your prompt to act. Content could be out of date or there could be a link distracting users and leading them away from converting.

Keywords and search listings

Don’t forget to keep putting yourself in the shoes of your potential customers. Keywords need to be refreshed from month to month to keep up with changing search behaviour and trends. You also need to keep an eye on the consumer experience of your brand. The quickest way to monitor your search visibility is to perform searches as if you are the user and check the subsequent search listings on all engines. For the most part, on the PPC model you have complete control of the text the user will see as you provide the summary text. However, for natural results search engines display what they deem to be the most relevant summary of words extracted from your website. This information may not always appear as you might expect. Therefore, for important target keywords you should review your listings, modify your site accordingly, and review again..

Optimising your campaigns

Analysis of web log files and more sophisticated site analytics improves your understanding of your visitors and which search engines are performing best for you. It is also an important indicator of whether your paid or natural search listings are driving the most traffic and also works out the relative cost efficiencies of each. Beyond web analytics, search engines allow you to drill down further by providing tools to allow you to monitor the success of your different keywords and to subsequently optimise campaigns in real-time.