You will want to start measuring the effectiveness of a PPC Campaign to calculate your return on investment (ROI) as soon as possible. So look at the goals you set, and the results you wanted, then compare them to what is actually happening during the period of the campaign.
So your first measurement might be how many unique visitors came through to your website by clicking on your PPC ads? This is the easy one to measure, as you know how many click throughs you paid for.
If you also have unique tracking facilities, you will know which keywords or phrases brought the most click throughs, and which ads worked the best. This is great information, and allows you to make adjustments and test alternatives to get the best CTR possible.
If you are getting a good CTR (click through rate) but not achieving more sales (if that was your goal) then it could be something that needs attention on your website. In that case, take a good look at what might have stopped someone making a purchase, and make some amendments as quickly as possible.
Remember that a PPC Campaign brings you highly targeted (pre-qualified) traffic, as people who do click through are already looking for what you offer, so if your website is fully optimized for the search engines, and your sales copy is compelling, you should be able to convert click through visitors to sales or to take the action you want.
Established Businesses Have a Head Start
If your business is already established and you already have a value per customer (VPC) then you will know what you are prepared to spend to acquire new customers. The VPC is your net monthly profit divided by the number of unique visitors per month. Use this as a starting point to decide on your monthly budget.
If you also know your existing conversion ratios (number of visitors who convert to sales) you will be able to measure the effectiveness of a PPC campaign very quickly, and calculate your return on investment (ROI)
You will be able to identify the new business coming in from your CPC (one visitor per click) and also calculate related sales. If these are really good, you could increase your VPC and your monthly PPC budget to acquire more customers.
A New Business Can be Jump Started
If you are just starting out and don't have any of these metrics at present, they will soon be available once your start a campaign. You can gather the information, then when your free traffic starts coming in as a result of search engine marketing, you will be able to compare the results and costs of your PPC Campaign against the results and costs of your SEO Marketing package and maintenance.
No-one can guarantee your ROI as this depends on your sales copy, your products or services, and other factors. The bigger the budget, the more click throughs you should get, but this doesn't guarantee sales. You can decide on a budget and adjust according to your results.
See what Google say about improving your ROI
See what Yahoo say about ROI
