A PPC Tracking Mistake to Avoid

By: Joseph Kiefer, ASM

I hesitate to write about this for fear of talking down to my audience, but since I made the mistake first I feel I should at least throw it out there. I will keep it brief. PPC has become a pretty standard marketing term over the course of the last 5 years and without looking up statistics I would venture to say the vast majority of companies are either using it or have used it.

As with all valid marketing methods, testing and tracking are the keys to long term success. Just starting a Google account and bidding on a couple of words you think describe your product will not bring success. PPC is a time intensive effort and constitutes a lot of research, testing, tracking, tweaking and starting from step one again. For many companies who do not have the expertise in PPC this is an exercise that may be best outsourced to a company specializing in PPC campaigns.

We first started testing PPC campaigns in 2003 and although I thought we did a lot of things well, we made a major error in the tracking we set up for our PPC campaigns. In general, the tracking was there, but it was at a very high level. At the time, the company of choice was Overture and we had tracking tied to Overture overall, but not to each individual keyword or at least groups of keywords.

So, overall, our PPC testing was showing a great ROI, but we were missing the detail. As we progressed with our testing we added more detailed tracking and soon realized that a lot of our success was coming from our own branded keywords. More likely than not these are search terms that we would have shown at the top for organically as well, but we decided to bid on them to make sure we were easy to find when those searches were made and the cost was so low.

Once we separated these terms out we found that the majority of our conversions were coming from those branded terms and they only accounted for a small percentage of the PPC costs. We were quickly able to make adjustments to the non-branded keywords that lowered our overall PPC costs, raised the ROI and started us on the way to much more successful PPC campaigns in the future. At this point our tracking has become much more detailed, but the fundamentals remain the same.