Establishing a regular measurement program will enable one to judge the true effectiveness of paid search campaigns, which are not always as clear cut as a measure of pure profit...

• Landing Pages

  Use unique landing pages

  Unique landing pages will make conversion tracking much easier as well as allowing for greater segmentation of campaign keywords, thus gaining a top quality score (and minimizing the cost per click as a result).

• Define Success

  Understand the objectives

  Before spending anything, there needs to be clearly spelled out goals - whether they are to drive traffic, gain new eyes on site, get a white paper download for though leadership, drive newsletter signups for drip marketing or gain direct sales on that visit.

• Record Results

  Consistent measures, consistent reporting

  Even simple spreadsheets can make the data presentation orderly, given a consistent dataset and make it easy to spot trends, dips, wins and identify issues of concern.