One of the most important areas to consider when beginning your pay per click(ppc) campaign is how/what you need to track. Traffic will be landing on your website and you need to be able to view the habits and patterns that people create when navigating around your website.

So many of my clients drag their feet when it comes to inserting tracking codes onto their website. Some fail to understand the benefit, while others struggle with their web developers to have them inserted promptly.

There are two main forms of tracking that we employ when running an Ad words campaign:

Google Conversion Tracking

Google Analytics

Conversion Tracking is very simple and only involves the insertion of a small piece of code onto one page of your website. Conversions are regarded as something that you deem valuable, from someone sending through an email enquiry to making a purchase online. The data provided by conversion tracking allows optimisation of the account to be more thorough, looking at areas of high CPA and adjusting accordingly while also being able to see high cost areas that don’t convert at all. It is a necessity to have conversion tracking installed on all ad words accounts before they go live.

Google Analytics differs from conversion tracking. With over 80 reports, your account will track visitors through your site and will keep track of the performance of your marketing campaigns, whether they are Ad words campaigns, email campaigns or any other advertising programme. It offers us a wealth of information about how users navigate your site, the amount of pages they view and the time they spend on the site. To set up analytics you need to insert a piece of code onto every page of your website. The information that you can glean from this is invaluable. The most appealing thing about Google Analytics is that for all its usefulness and information, it’s FREE! So you have no reason for not utilising its benefits.

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Keyword research is the foundation of any Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign. After setting out a target, budget and focus for the campaigns, the keyword research is when an advertiser sets out which terms their ads will appear for. And just as importantly, the terms that the ads will not appear for.

The focus of a campaign is important to maintain, to ensure consistency of budget, ad impressions and therefore ROI. These thoughts need to be carried across in to every stage of the campaign build.

1. Start Generic - When starting the initial keyword research the first “seed word” needs to be generic to the campaign subject. This will give ideas for common themes within the subject. Taking furniture as an example seed word would return keywords such as bedroom furniture, living room furniture, oak furniture. These could form the basics of the ad groups or even negative keywords.

2. Be thorough – Each keyword added to the list needs to be re-entered to the keyword tool you are using and drilled down further. This interrogation needs to continue until no other variants can be found.

3. Manually check – Download the selected keyword list and run through, checking and adding further variants, plurals and phrase combinations.

4. Use more than one source – While the Google Keyword Tool is one of the simplest to use there are many more options available. MSN and Yahoo both provide useful tools that could provide a few more vital keywords.

5. If it’s not in, It’s Out! – Stay to your to the campaign focus and target and if the tool returns keywords that are not relevant to your business, add those keywords as negative keywords. The ads need to appear for the most relevant searches, the search terms you specify. The rule to apply is if it not a keyword it should be used as a negative keyword.

For both Google and MSN PPC campaigns, better performance and cost per click (CPC) can be earned with good keyword research. Sponsored links returned for an exact match are almost guaranteed to perform at a lower CPC than those appearing for broad or expanded match terms.

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