Search Marketing Trainer

If you're just starting out with PPC and are about to launch a new campaign, chances are you have some goals in mind. Goals can be anything from trying to generate traffic and awareness of a newly launched site or initiative (e.g., clicks), to trying to generate leads and/or sales for various items including products, white papers, newsletter subscriptions or site registrations (conversions).

I'm going to refrain from going into a detailed description of goals. Instead, I'm going to outline some guidelines that I think are really important to keep in mind.

1. Have them (goals, that is). Please make them something more substantial then "I want to drive traffic to my Web site." There are lots of less costly methods to generate buzz and traffic to your Web site - SEO, for example, or Press Releases and blog outreach. PPC marketing is paid media. Most advertisers should have at least one conversion goal associated with their campaign, even if it's just a newsletter sign up.
2. Make sure your goals are realistic. I've had many clients approach me with goals that are based on absolutely nothing more than what they think PPC can do for them - whether that's driving an unrealistic number of conversions to their site, or getting those conversions at an unrealistically low CPA, or getting enormous amounts of traffic in ridiculously short periods of time...you name it, I've heard it. The thing is, search marketing is not mass media. It's nothing like mass media and that means there are often limitations to the number of people you can reach in a given period of time. Perform some research to forecast your traffic and conversions before you settle on your goals. It's a real eye opener.
3. Track conversions! I can't really express how important this is without typing in all caps, and that's just obnoxious so I'll refrain from doing it. It's really important to track your conversions, whatever they may be, in order to measure whether the campaign is reaching its goals. I don't want to hear you say that PPC has failed you as a media outlet if you can't tell me why and you and I both know you can't tell me why it's failed if you don't have the hard numbers to prove it. The same goes for success metrics, actually. Don't get all "search rules!" and "yay PPC" on me because you hit your conversion goals in the first month. Figure out if those leads or sales you're getting are actually valuable - back sales into an ROI model, for one. Check with your sales people or review your database to make sure your leads aren't all junk.

Let's move on to the critical next step here - Conversion Tracking. It's important you implement Conversion Tracking (or have a plan in place for implementation) before you spend a significant amount of money on PPC.