How to track ROI for PPC campaign?

I want to be able to track my PPC campaigns and see how much return I m getting.

Does anyone have any example spreadsheet on how to do this?

I have about 8 campaigns running on Google adwords and overture.

I would like to track them by month and see how well they are doing. Right know, I know how much $ in sales are generated by each campaign.

However, I need help organizing all the data into meaningful speadsheets.

Thanks for any advice

all you need are a few simple columns.

ad group
ad spend
sales
profit
roi

ad spend is a given
sales you already know
profit = sales - ad spend - expenses
roi = profit / ad spend

you can set up a couple different ones to check display the results vs different time segments

if i have some spare time I will try to make one for you tonight

Tracking through a spreadsheet is an excellent way to get started especially if you have the time to dedicate to it. If your short on time, there are also services that track your conversion rate and your ROI for you automatically. This is generally the most accurate way to track ROI and to determine which campaigns, ad groups and keywords generate the most revenue and have the highest ROI.

Also, be aware that highest ROI does not always mean biggest profit/return.

For example, making 10% profit on sales of $1,000 is better than 50% profit on sales of $10 whilst the ROI of the latter is higher than the former.

In PPC terms what this means is that you have to know the relative different ROIs of your keywords in their different positions and then select the optimum combination within your budget constraints.

Neil

Neil has a great metric... but putting this into a time perspective... PROFIT PER DAY is the most important goal.

From what I have seen with my own efforts the highest ROI generally corresponds with the lower profit per day numbers... this is because the higher ROI is generally associated with low bid / low traffic exposure. What would be beter, making $500/month with a fantastic ROI or making $500/day with a small ROI number.

Totally agree, in my analyses ROI can be plotted against bid position pretty accurately as a 2nd order polynomial with a -ve x^2. As the plot of bid position vs cpc is often close to a straight line with -ve slope the general implication is that optimal ROI, where the slope is zero is going to be far down the bid positions and so generate little return.

The challenge is to climb the increasingly steep slope of total Return. If you have a fixed budget and are doing this over many keywords then you really need to get some computational assistance.

Plotting that data is a great idea Neil, I am going to go plotting as soon as I am done reading here at seochat.

Instead of bidding on broad matches, I have been submitting thousands of specific matches using an excel spreadsheet to create/manage to searchterm variants. With this I can see campaigns that are profitable and unprofitable but it takes a long time to collect enough data on individual terms - and there can be profitable terms in an unprofitable campaign.

Do you know of any metrics that can help you decide when you have enough data to turn off an unprofitable term? To make this easy, let's throw bid level out and assume that we are paying the minimum bid.

Unprofitable is easy (I think) if you can assign a value to each of the #impressions, #clicks, and #conversions, and $ to deliver. Is "Total Value" - "Total Cost" > Zero?

Slightly more complex is the continuous scale of profitability. Here, I'd compare the profitability of each of the terms at the minimum bid compared to its profitability when it's disabled (zero in most cases). Then you can compare the profitability at one 0.1 bid position above what the minimum buys you etc. etc. That's Bubz.

I did see a tool the other day that could tell you when you have enough information to be able to make a decision on a term (can't remember where I'm afraid), but I think that that is also a farily well studied concept in general population statistics - generally 100-1000 of anything based on human behaviour has always seemed to be enough for me.

Of course, if you get 0.1 clicks per day on a term then waiting for a 1000 clicks could take some time :-)

I have this program that does it for you that you install on your server.

All I need is someone to help me figure it out. Can someone help me pleeeassseeee LOL

I don't know how to add things in etc.

Thanks


Michelle

P.S. It's called MROI