Online marketing is now essential for businesses as the internet becomes more integrated in our daily lives. Pay per click advertising is one of the most effective form of online advertising today. PPC campaigns draw traffic from search engines by displaying ads relevant to what is being searched. When clicked, these ads take visitors to a sales page or landing page.

PPC campaigns ultimately aim to produce interest in a product or increase sales. The technology used in PPC campaigns allow for a quick turnaround of marketing data. Most ppc networks, including Google Adwords, give its users the ability to access useful reports regarding the performance of your campaign – allowing you to tweak your campaigns for better results.

Raw numbers from traffic counts are the basis of measuring ad effectiveness, and will tell you exactly what types of visitors are arriving at your site. While this data will only give you an overview of the total volume of traffic, you will be able to drill down the dates of these traffic counts and match them up to the days that your ad campaigns were run.

Conversion rates are perhaps the most critical metric for your PPC campaign. Understanding how many clicks turned into a sale will give you a chance to determine how much it costs you to generate a lead from your campaign, and you can measure this over a period of time to determine the effectiveness of your ads. Keep in mind that measuring conversions can take many forms.

Author Joseph Thornton, of the book “The Online Advertising Playbook”, states that conversion can also be in the form of a customer signing-up for your news letter, disclosing of contact information, or even downloading a free product from your site.

Another effective way of evaluating your PPC campaigns is to track the conversion of your keywords. Tracking conversions down to the keyword level requires a greater effort on your part but this information will tell you exactly which keywords you need to drop and which keywords you need to optimize your site around.

Finally, determining the rankings of your advertising segment will help you determine which placement is the best for your particular niche or industry. Google Adwords rotates the ads in its sidebar column to ensure a fair advantage for all advertisers, but there are some spots that are considered ‘Featured ads’. These spots may have more value for you in a very competitive market, and can make it easier for you to decide where and how to promote your PPC campaign and achieve the best possible results.

Marketing with Google Adwords is a powerful technique that most websites can use to find more customers. Writing quality Google Ads is one of the most important skills to have when using Adwords – and there are many good training guides available online.