Whilst most of us tend to focus our attention on optimising our links, keywords and web pages for search engines in order to drive natural traffic to our sites, there is still a lot to be said for pay per click advertising. Most companies will be involved in some form of PPC campaigns which will run alongside their standard SEO strategy. Digital display advertising is a necessity to some companies and previously monitoring its effectiveness seemed pretty straightforward – you simply monitor the number of click throughs to your site.
Google Adwords is one of the SEO tools most commonly used by businesses to create online ads for PPC campaigns. Adverts could then be displayed on Google and within the Google content network. The process of using Adwords has been extremely successful and still continues to be, yet ask any company involved in PPC advertising and they will still require a more detailed breakdown of their website traffic. It seemed that click through rate (CRT) alone was not satisfactory. At SearchEngineOptimisation.co.uk, we can advise you how to best use Adwords for your business.
When you first consider a PPC campaign, it seems that a CRT is the most obvious and accurate way of monitoring the effectiveness of the advertisement. However, what companies were stating was that not everybody who is interested in your advertisement will click through to it there and then. This actually makes perfect sense, as with the exception of point of sale advertising, it is rare for standard advertisements elsewhere to have an instant and direct response.
As with everything, Google listened to what its users wanted and catered for their needs. In this instance, with the launch of the view through tracking tool for Adwords. What the tool does is tell you how many people responded to an online advert after seeing it, not after clicking on it. How they do this is basically to monitor a thirty day period after the ad was posted and if a user was on a site where they saw your advert and then they visited your website at some point in the following weeks, this would class as a conversion from the advertisement. A clever method for Google to use, but how accurate actually is it?
There is no denying that there will be a percentage of users who view an advertisement but do not act immediately. For instances such as this, this approach is applicable. On the other hand however, how many people are actually visiting a website purely based on that advertisement? The chances are that if the advertisement was the sole reason, then they would have clicked on it, which means that the original way of measuring PPC campaigns was correct.
If your company name is already known by somebody then they may visit your website of their own accord. Imagine however, that a week earlier they were on a web page where your advertisement was displayed. Google would count this visit to your site as a direct response of the advertisement, when in fact it was not. As with all things Google, we will just have to wait and see.
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Posted by Dan.
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