PPC & Web Analytics

The Irreducible Value of Analytics
–or–
Why PPC Managers Need Be Expert in Web Analytics

Over 55% of the Fortune 1000 companies don't employ analytics on their web sites (other than server log analysis, perhaps). That's a staggering figure, especially considering those same companies are probably spending handsomely on pay per click advertising. Spending may be too generous a word. Wasting money may be more accurate—harsh but accurate.

In the increasingly competitive PPC bid environment,
expert analysis of web behavior will be the price of entry.

Conversions are the typical measure of a PPC campaign's success. A basic investment in analytics will inform campaign managers which search engine earned the conversion, which campaign, even which keyword but they will never know how many visitors the campaign paid for who promptly bounced—left a few seconds later, longer before they could engage with the site's content.

In Web Analytics An Hour A Day Avinash Kaushik writes that when analysts begin segmenting bounce rate by PPC campaign, “Decision makers are shocked that 60 percent or 80 percent of the traffic that they are paying for with every single click stays for such a small amount of time....”

You should be shocked as well, I would add. If your bounce rate in 60 or 80 percent for paid traffic, then your PPC campaign is paying for the wrong traffic. But how would you know unless you're tracking bounce rate segmented by search engine, campaign, keyword and creative?

Once you do know, you can begin refining your campaigns by revising your creative to be more explicit and employing negative keywords to help qualify your traffic, reducing the bounce rate as a measure of your success.

You need to ensure your analytics team is
measuring what you need to succeed.

PPC management is moving beyond the simple, undifferentiated metric of conversions. It requires an increasingly sophisticated understanding of your customers and their behavior in increasingly granular segments. The only way to gain that understanding is through web analytics. As a PPC manager, you need to partner closely with your analytics team, understand what they measure and what it means, and ensure that they're measuring what you need to succeed.

Technorati Tags: SEM, PPC, web analytics, bounce rates, avinash kaushik, web analytics an hour a day, charles thrasher