About PPC Advertising:
Part 3: Paying for Leads - PPC Economics
The Numbers Don't Lie
The day after you start a PPC campaign, you can have spreadsheets emailed to you containing statistics about the performance of your ad. performance. The most important statistics for Adwords are:
- Cost Per Click: the average amount you paid every time people searched that particular keyword, saw your ad, and clicked on it.
- ClickThrough Rate: the ratio of clicks (the number of times people clicked on your ad, which you pay for) to impressions (the number of times your ad appeared on a page, which you do not pay for).
There are other statistics that relate to whether your impressions get clicked, like the average position of the ad on the page, the keyword people entered when it showed up, the time of day it was shown, etc.
Getting Leverage
If your ad does not appear high enough on page one (or not on page one at all) for a given keyword, you might improve its position by changing the wording of your ad to match the keyword better, or bidding higher for that keyword.
Statistics tell you how well this is working. Not being able to read and interpret your statistics is like playing Russian Roulette – a game of blind chance. At 50 cents a click with a $100 monthly budget, you might be able to play for a while....but what if your minimum bid needs to be $5 per click? Or $50?
PPC Tarmac helps you save money by configuring your statistical reports, interpreting them with (or for) you, and making the helpful changes they imply. However, this is what any Adwords expert does. Our difference is in connecting what happens BEFORE people click to what happens AFTER.
It turns out that the pages your clicks land on strongly affect your ad position and what you pay for clicks. They also determine whether you get a sale.
