Pay per click search marketing has exploded in popularity over the years.  And for a good reason.  Pay per click search marketing is an excellent and effective way to get highly targeted traffic to your site immediately.  Unlike search engine optimization (SEO) which can take several months to rank for any particular keyword phrase.  Not to say that SEO is not effective.  It is an absolute must for any business that wants to have a serious online marketing presence.   However, today’s focus will be on pay per click search marketing.

Anytime I’m talking to a prospect, I’m always asked the same questions:

1. Why should I choose you?
2. What makes you different than the other pay per click search marketing company’s out there?
3. What is your search marketing strategy?
4. How will I know if my campaign is successful?

I love these questions, because it always opens up a great discussion on what they are currently doing for the pay per click search marketing efforts, whether it was successful, what they learned…etc.  The funny thing is that the more clients and prospects I talk to, the more I realize that most of them, regardless of the size of the company rarely know whether previous online marketing campaigns were successful or not.  In many cases this comes down to hiring a vendor that does not focus on the metrics, is not organized and most importantly is not tracking conversions (a new lead, subscription or a sale).

Because it is so important to have conversion tracking set up, I will not start a pay per click search marketing campaign unless they have this enabled.  This tool is the foundation of optimizing any pay per click search marketing campaign.  It tells the pay per click manager, which keyword and ad led to a conversion, which is extremely valuable as when starting a pay per click search marketing campaign, the ads and keywords that are initially chosen are simply a best guess based on understanding the client’s business.  It’s the actual performance of the campaign in terms of conversion rates and cost per conversion metrics that will tell the pay per click manger what are the best keywords and ads to focus on.

The bottom line of any pay per click search marketing campaign is to get a return on the client’s investment.  Tracking conversion is the first step for doing this.  However, it’s not just a matter of generating lots of leads at low prices.  It’s about getting high quality leads that will eventually become opportunities and then closed deals.   The best way to go about this is to integrate your paid search campaign with whatever customer relationship management (CRM) system your company is using.  Saleforce.com, which is the market leader for CRM systems already has this built into their framework and is fairly easy to set up.

It’s critical that any pay per click search marketing company understands all the working parts in a campaign and takes a holistic perspective when running a pay per click search marketing campaign.