Maybe this year you decided that you wouldn’t bother with personal resolutions that you have no chance of keeping; no resolving to get to the gym more or eat only healthy food. Maybe this year, instead, you decided to go with a New Year’s Resolution for your career. If you are a marketer, here is just one simple resolution to help you become more successful.

Measure More.

What should you measure?

PPC or anywhere that you are spending money online
Brand Awarenewss
Engagement & Usability
Conversions & what leads to a conversion

Measuring PPC or any online advertising

The first step to measuring your PPC or online marketing is critical. You must make the ad ‘trackable.’ This can be done one of two ways. You can either send traffic to a unique landing page for each ad or your can use unique parameters for tracking. If you are using parameters, you will want the URL to be unique for the level of detail that you want to analyze.

Some examples are:
source=engine
campaign=campaignname
ag=adroup
creative=versionofcreative

So a destination URL for a Google PPC ad would look like:
www.website.com/page.html?source=google&campaign=holiday& ag=holidaysale&creative=1

That would give you all of the information to analyze your ad down to the different versions of each creative.

Or you may want to track the ads down to a keyword level which would look like:
www.website.com/page.html?source=google&campaign=holiday& ag=holidaysale&kw=[holidaysale]

A destination URL for a banner ad running in the Entertainment section of cnn.com would look like:
www.website.com/page.html?source=cnn&section=entertainment

Once you have the destination URLs in place and the ads go live, you then can measure the campaign traffic as a unique segment. You can see which of your keywords and ads are working, which need to be tweaked and which just are not worth their CPC.

You’ll want to take a two-part approach to analyzing campaigns. You will want to use your analytics to track the behavior of the PPC traffic once visitors get to your site, but you also want to use the information that the search engines provide to track your CPC and your quality score. This is important since now both Google & Yahoo factor your quality score and your CTR history into what you must pay for the click. Improving your click-thru rate and quality score will lower your CPC.

As far as tracking your campaigns using analytics, there are several metrics that you should pay attention to. Comparing the number of clicks from the search engines to the number reported in your analytics package can be a bit confusing since the numbers will never match exactly. It is likely that the number reported in the analytics package will be lower than what the search engines report. That is because there is a subset of the traffic who just never make it to your site. They click, but then hit the back button or just close the browser before the page loads.

Looking at the number of visitors is good but paying attention to the quality of the traffic is even better. One good rule of thumb if you want your ads to be profitable, is to never pay more for a click than the average revenue per visitor. If your campaigns are not to drive ecommerce but to build brand awareness set a minimum average time on site as the key metric for that campaign and use that to judge success of keywords and ads.

By using your analytics teamed with the information that the search engines provide you will be able to tune up your campaigns, pay less for the clicks and improve the quality of the traffic. 2008 may not hold any fitness goals for you, but you certainly can get your online advertising in shape.

Next week, we’ll tackle measuring your brand awareness.

Filed under: Analytics on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 by Joy Brazelle |
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