If you use Google Adwords or any other Paid Search (pay per click) advertising to promote your business you need to make sure that the clicks you are paying for are producing good quality, targeted traffic for your website.

If you have a good analytics program, such as Google Analytics it is quite an easy job to identify fraudulent or ‘spam’ clicks,  You can use your website analytics to also measure the effectiveness or ‘validity’ of the traffic that your PPC campaign is driving to your website.

One way you can do this is to study the ‘page views’.  Take a look at your AdWords analysis in Google Analytics, or whichever other analytics software you are using, and check the average number of page views your PPC visitors make.  If your target is for each visitor to look at a minimum of three page views  and your PPC visitors are only looking at one page there is a strong possibility that the PPC traffic is not targeted traffic and therefore not good quality traffic’.

An even more obvious clue that poor quality or even fraudulent traffic is making up a high percentage of your PPC visitors can be found by looking at the ‘time spent on site’ statistics.  When you see a figure of zero or 0.5 seconds or less there is a high probability that the visitors are not people at all!  This is commonly known as ‘click fraud’ and if you think this is happening to you, and your analytics support this, you should approach the search engine for a refund of your click costs.

If your web analytics goals are e-commerce driven then it is even easier to track conversion.  Just make sure that you are looking at the trend over a reasonable time – frame, say 3 months or more.

If your web site has not generated the web analytics conversion numbers you are looking for over a 3 month period and the traffic that has been sent to your website via your pay per click campaign looks poor in terms of average time spent on the site and page views, then it makes it easier for you as a business owner to make an informed decision about whether to continue the campaign or not – or at least you will know that you need to change something.

If you need help in understanding what your web analytics are telling you or with managing your PPC campaigns please leave a message below or visit WSI IMS – WSI Internet Marketing Services in Surrey, Sussex, Kent and the South East of England.