3 – Link ad to EXACT landing page of offer described in ad, NEVER to your home page. If your prospects have to search for a link to offer, they simply won’t do it in most cases. The web is all about instant gratification, and “back button” is used extensively when people click on a link only to find something that wasn’t described in ad.

4 – Test, test, and then test some more! The key to maximizing ROI of any ad campaign is testing, and PPC is no different. Set up test campaigns using various keywords/phrases and different ad copy. Analyze results after a few days, and then drop ads that perform poorly and expand ones that do well.

5 – Experiment with bid prices for your keywords. For example, you might well find that a bid of $0.35 results in almost as many clicks (and customers) as a bid of $0.55! This means you save 20 cents on each and every click! Remember, your ad doesn’t have to be displayed in top position for it to be effective.

http://www.cryer.co.uk/resources/websitetracking.htm http://www.netiq.com/webtrends/default.asp http://www.statcounter.com/

If you answered "I don't have need, as I already do this" - congratulations - you get a week's free pass to Smug Club. But seriously though - you might already get all statistics about how your website is performing but do you spend time viewing them, interpreting them and most importantly - USING them? When was last time you used statistics about your website's performance to implement a change on your site and then track results on subsequent statistics to see what effect it had? It's all gone quiet in Smug corner...

Feeling uncomfortable with all these questions yet? You should be. If you're not happy with your website you need to dig a little deeper and ask what it is exactly that you're not happy with. Did you set definite, time-linked and realistic expectations for website's performance prior to starting out? If you're not getting leads or sales you had hoped for you need to work out why this is case - scratching your head won't do it. Tracking performance of your site and viewing detailed statistics on how people use it won't give you definitive answers either - but it will propel you several miles in right direction.

You are doctor and your website is patient - you need to connect it to an ECG and start monitoring and recording everything. How else can you work out how to make patient better? Or maybe you have perfect patient who doesn't actually have anything wrong with them?

Mike Cheney www.magnet4web.com

Michael Cheney is the Author of The Website Marketing BibleTM:

"High five Michael! Your bible is superb! The world needs to read it and learn from it." - Jay Conrad Levinson, Author of "Guerrilla Marketing"