With Pay Per Click Marketing being a very direct and instant form of advertising your products or services to the general web search world, a fast and frenzied approach to a new account can be taken. Keywords can be expensive and positions hard to get for the money. Many of you may think just spend and spend more again. However this is not always the case and big budgets are not always available........

So a real concentration on making your budget work to its full potential is needed for times like this. You need to have and idea of your return on investment or a have a target in mind of what you are prepared to pay to get your potential clients to complete your call to action. Whether this be to fill in a form, buy a product or even call you ( the latter being the hardest to work out unless you know that the call came from your campaign).

With all of these factors taken into mind you can work out for yourself a realistic CPA target for your campaign and set goals to achieve this target. As an example if you are paying £1 per click and it takes you 100 clicks for a person to buy a product or service then your CPA is £100.

Total Cost spent / Total Conversions = CPA

Most PPC Marketing companies will base a campaigns performance on the CPA and hitting targets set buy both clients and agencies combined. Obviously you need to be realistic here and take in other factors such as industry standard conversion rates online, the cost per click and the target audience. If you are merely data capturing with a free product download for instance your conversion rate will be a lot higher than someone who is selling flat screen TVs and who is playing in a much more competitive market.

If your product or service( using the above example) earns you £80 profit after all of your overheads are taken out of the equation a CPA of £100 is no good and alarm bells should ring and you need to be working on your campaign. This could be tweaking Keywords, Ads or Landing pages and sometimes even rebuilding entire Pay Per Click Campaigns to get your CPA within a sensible amount. If you can drop your CPC to £0.50 the whole scenario will change..... Now if you are paying £0.50 per click and it takes you 100 clicks for a person to buy a product or service then your CPA reduces now to £50. This in turn means at profit per unit of £80 you will be earning £30 per conversion. This also works with increasing conversions. So if you simple cant get the Cost Per Click down then concentrate your efforts on converting the clicks you are getting. With clicks at £1 if you can get 2 conversions in 100 then the same CPA of £50 can be achieved. Food for thought and even more areas to work on improving.

Happy tweaking for now and tune in again for part 5....................