Paid Search Reporting and Performance Tracking
Yahoo!

Paid search marketing is one of the most effective ways to create an online presence for your business. By bidding on keywords, you can get a higher placement on search engine results pages, making your web site more visible to more potential customers. You can get even more out of paid search process by tracking your progress to see what’s working and what isn’t. Like any marketing effort, paid search has to provide a return on investment (ROI) and requires effective, reliable reporting and performance tracking metrics.

Reliable reports help you to create paid search ads and campaigns that align with your company’s objectives, and the reports themselves serve as a guide when you add products and services to your online offering. The content of your reports, which contain click-throughs, conversion rates, and other web analytics, should help you determine which keywords are working, which ones are not, how your business should optimize its submissions, and when to add more keywords and phrases.

Search Engine Reports
Many paid search services offer reporting and tracking functions that make it easy to monitor your results, such as:

  • The ability to log into your account at any time to check the number of times your ad is shown on results pages, total clicks, click-through rates, and click fees for each keyword included in your campaign.
  • The ability to generate reports to immediately spot problems. For example, you may discover keywords that were rejected during the submission process or deleted due to poor click-through performance.
  • Click-through reports that help control your budget. For instance, by monitoring your fees at the beginning of the campaign, you can monitor actual expenses and see how these costs compare to what you estimated.

Click-through reports do not reveal an ad’s profitability, however. This is something that you can calculate by knowing your conversion rate (the percentage of customers that click through to your site when they view your ad) and revenue/profit per sale or by using ROI-based tracking solutions. Regardless, you need to be able to determine whether the amount you currently are bidding on a keyword is producing the results you desire.

Each service has a slightly different array of reports available so make sure that its reporting services meet your company’s needs. In some cases, paid search services will fine-tune the reports to meet your specific needs, but you need to inquire about availability in advance. Without implementing reporting and performance tracking, there’s no way to tell if your paid search approach is working.

Make It a Habit
Continually tracking the performance of your paid search campaign will help you make sure your marketing dollars are going in the right direction. The dynamics of search engines change every day, so what’s working for you today may not necessarily work for you tomorrow. The most effective reporting frequencies are:

  • Daily : When you launch new paid search campaigns or update your bidding on keywords, it’s important to monitor the performance on a daily basis, in the short term.
  • Weekly : Once a week, spend some time checking on site traffic and sales and ROI numbers. Determine if there are issues with any keywords, and update ad copy if necessary.
  • Monthly : Monthly, you should dig deeper into your ROI analysis. You’ll be able to tell more from a month-long analysis than a daily or weekly one. Check which search engines, products, or keywords are working, and delete any that aren’t.

Implementing reporting and performance tracking mechanisms to your paid search campaigns will improve your current ones and point your future campaigns in the right direction. The content of the reports will let you know which ads are working for you and which aren’t, allowing you to determine your ROI and see where you can improve.