The most common objective of those who engage in pay per click marketing is to get high rankings in the search engine results page (SERP) because this means higher chances of getting more clicks for their website which also means great volume of site visitors.
Pay per click is not just about generating traffic to your site. If you are keen enough, you should be able to see that pay per click is more than just the clicks and the site traffic. Conversion of these clicks and this website traffic is one thing that should also greatly considered when doing pay per click.
Conversion happens when an online surfer visits your website and takes some actions you are expecting him to do. In pay per click, you do not want site visitors to just click on your ad, take a short glimpse of your site and leave without doing anything on the site.
If you have an online store, conversion would simply mean having those site visitors purchase your product or your service or by simply inquiring about your services and filling up an online inquiry form. These are what you expect your site visitors to do.
Conversion does not always mean having a sale of your product. It could also mean making the site visitors do something on your site that is considered valuable to your business.
It is along this line that you should also think about what to expect out of your site visitors. Before engaging into pay per click, it is also wise to determine the target results that you want to get out of these online visitors. If that cannot be established, investing in PPC might not be a good idea.
Since conversion is an important aspect of marketing under pay per click, it is recommended that you track conversion. The good news is that major search engines do provide tracking tools. Google Analytics is one, and this is worth using. This tool will allow you to measure the conversions coming from pay per click sources.
If a tracking tool is not available, then you can always do it personally using a spreadsheet. You can track the conversions total per day. Was there an increase in conversions right after the pay per click marketing campaign was adopted? If there was no increase, then time to shift to another strategy.