In the world of Marketing, not much is easier to hold accountable than your Google PPC advertising. If your PPC campaign is set up properly, you can track your cost-per-conversion down to the penny and be confident in whether or not you’re getting a good return on your investment. If you’re looking to start a PPC campaign, I previously wrote a blog about how to set up an effective PPC campaign.
Below are 3 steps to setting up your conversion tracking to figure out your exact ROI on your PPC campaign:
1. Dedicated Landing Pages and forms. By setting up dedicated landing pages and forms, you can be certain that the only people who fill out that form came from your PPC campaign. In order to help ensure this, make sure you noindex the page so it does not start ranking in the search engines and do not link to it from anywhere but your PPC campaign.
2. Dedicated call tracking numbers with capabilities to listen to each call. This will allow you to know that each call is coming from your PPC campaign. From there you can listen to each call and determine whether or not these calls are actual leads, inquiries or other (sales calls, etc.).
3. Tie your leads into a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) system like Infusionsoft that allows you to track the lead through the conversion funnel. You can directly link your forms to the CRM so that each lead imports automatically into the CRM and you can track whether or not it becomes a sale and even keep track of whether or not it becomes recurring business. You can also insert your phone leads into the CRM and track how much money is brought in from that sale as well.
Don’t panic if you do not have the resources to set up your conversion tracking to this level of detail. The steps above are ways to track each lead down to the dollar brought in from your PPC campaign but there are other ways to keep track of whether or not your PPC campaign is effective. Here are a few quick ways to track conversions if you don’t have the resources for the steps above:
Simply by setting up the conversion code at the end of your conversion process will give you a good idea on how many leads you are getting. You may not be able to track exactly which leads came from PPC and which came from other marketing efforts, but you will be able to tell how many of them are coming from PPC as well as the keyword and ad the conversion came from. This is a bit trickier, as you can’t put a conversion code on the phone number. However, if you train the support staff to ask where they heard about your services you can track it down to search engines. Generally people don’t know if this is a paid click or an organic click so you may not be able to go to that level but you can at least know it came from your search engine efforts. Though a CRM certainly makes it easier, you can use spreadsheets and other organizational tactics to keep track of the revenue from each client. If you can track that client back to your PPC efforts you can tie that revenue back as a return on your PPC investment.
How to use this Information
For people who have never done PPC before, just setting up an account can be overwhelming, let alone trying to track your conversions properly. If you want help setting up a PPC account, or help setting up ROI tracking on your current campaign, set up a free consultation today! If you have any other tips on how you track your ROI feel free to comment below!
