Quantifying pay per click ROI
Over the last year we have modified our paid key word phrase campaigns (daily / monthly budgets) on various search engines with interesting, yet unexplainable results. For example, we have increased our budget and found the number of unique visitors decrease but activity (pages / jobs viewed) increase. We also found that we can decrease our budget and have the number of unique visitors increase. Neither trend sustains more than a month or so at a time.
We very recently updated the design and verbiage to improve both the look and the organic positioning of key word / phrases search results. It is too soon to determine to what extent the updates will improve the unpaid search results. Has anyone found / developed a sound formula to quantify pay per click campaigns or know of an industry best traffic monitor to recommend?
We very recently updated the design and verbiage to improve both the look and the organic positioning of key word / phrases search results. It is too soon to determine to what extent the updates will improve the unpaid search results. Has anyone found / developed a sound formula to quantify pay per click campaigns or know of an industry best traffic monitor to recommend?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by David Sickmiller on
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Hi Tony,
To do any sort of detailed ROI measurements, you'll need to be able to segment your customers by source/campaign. You didn't name what you're using to measure traffic, but I see that you're using Google Analytics on LTCCareer.com. That is more than capable for the job.
To measure ROI, you'll need to need to determine what should be considered a conversion for your company's websites and how much a conversion is worth. Let's say you want visitors to submit your "Forward Resume" form and each submission is worth roughly $10. In Google Analytics, you can configure the "Thanks for submitting your resume" page as a "goal." If you have your AdWords account linked with your Analytics account, they will actually do all the calculations for you.
In general, you'll want to pay attention to your conversion rate and the cost per conversion. If you get 1 resume submitted for every 100 visitors who click on your ads, that's a 1% conversion rate. If you paid an average of $0.25/click to get those 100 visitors, it cost you $25 for that one conversion (which we previously said was worth $10). In this scenario, you would need to pay no more than $0.10/click to break even.
David
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Permalink Reply by Tony Perry on -
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I will implement the conversions tracking metrics and study the actual revenue generated over a month / year. At that point I can measure the actual conversion value as a resume (for us) is worth somewhere between 0 and 20K, and a new client could be worth 500+K over time.
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