A study collated a few years back showed that in the electronic and gaming markets over 90% of searchers trawled the net and found specific product information online, but then bought offline. The trend was to visit a local store or pick up the phone and purchase.

As a Pay Per Click Campaign delivery Manager this is one of the biggest hurdles that I come across on a day to day basis. Many clients have raised concerns regarding a low conversion rate but have been too busy on the phone with new customers to take a return call and put this down to nothing more than a busy period. When in reality this surge comes from their paid search campaign.

Conversions tracked through a pay par click campaign are usually counted when searchers fill out a form or request a call back etc. More often than not this is not taken into consideration when creating landing pages and these calls to action are hidden at the bottom of the page or extremely hard to find.

Our biggest bugbear when searching for landing pages to attach conversion tracking to, is the belief of plastering every page with contact numbers, email addresses and postal addresses just in case you miss a potential sale or sign up. This deters searchers from doing what you want them to do by filling in your form. Do away with all of this unnecessary Information that detracts searchers from contacting you via the desired format. Here are just a few ways to track your conversions.........

Create a unique landing page for your PPC campaign. This page should have no other contact info apart from the call to action that you are tracking, and or the product or services you are advertising.

If you are only able to take calls through the site then you can get a dedicated 0845 number for your unique PPC landing page. This way you know that all of the calls come from your campaign.

Should you not wish to create a new number for these pages you could request your Telesales people ask how a searcher found you and collate this info over time to make a qualified assumption on the source of the traffic? However this is not as accurate!

Use your ads to screen the traffic by inserting a special voucher number or reference code to be quoted on the phone to receive further info or better still a discount. The searchers with this Reference must have clicked through your ad so this can now be tracked and recorded as a conversion.

Pay Per Click campaigns work so much more efficiently when conversions are tracked properly, managers can take stock of the "must have" conversion data and concentrate their optimising efforts on areas that are both over and underperforming to create the ultimate converting campaign.........