Sunday, June 14, 2009

Conversions in Pay Per Click Marketing

By Sean Galusha

In pay per click marketing, the most common intent of the business owner is to position his listing on top of SERPs, and get clicks coming from internet users. With greater clicks comes greater traffic for the website. And with greater traffic comes greater happiness. Correct, or are we missing something fundamentally important?

But pay per click is not just about getting that high volume of traffic to your site. The very essence of pay per click does not end in getting traffic to your site but it is about conversion. So, what is conversion and what is its main role in the pay per click marketing?

Conversion will happen if the site visitor will take some desirable action in the website, as opposed to site visits wherein the user enters the site and leaves the website without contributing to the website.

If for example you have an online store, then the conversions that may happen in the site will involve the users making a direct purchase, the user downloading a service or the user completing the sales inquiry form. Simple visits will mean that the user enters and leaves unnoticed.

It should be remembered that the conversion doesn't actually mean that it is a sale. Conversion may have other meanings too, and this will include user activities that may be worth something to the business and to you.

It is along this line that you should also think about what to expect out of your site visitors. Before engaging into pay per click, it is also wise to determine the target results that you want to get out of these online visitors. If that cannot be established, investing in PPC might not be a good idea.

Since conversion is an important aspect of marketing under pay per click, it is recommended that you track conversion. The good news is that major search engines do provide tracking tools. Google Analytics is one, and this is worth using. This tool will allow you to measure the conversions coming from pay per click sources.

If a tracking tool is not available, then you can always do it personally using a spreadsheet. You can track the conversions total per day. Was there an increase in conversions right after the pay per click marketing campaign was adopted? If there was no increase, then time to shift to another strategy.

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