How much does online advertising by Google AdWords cost? What is the return on investment (ROI)? Planning an advertising campaign on Internet, as on every channel, means studying carefully a plan that is oriented to specific goals that can be measured with precision. John Wanamaker, the American pioneer of marketing, in the nineteenth century said : “Half of what I spend on advertising is lost, the problem is that I do not know which half”. One of the advantages of the web, compared to traditional media, is the ability to track precisely the online behavior of users and provide comprehensive data that indicate the performance of the online campaign, the overall conversions and the ROI.
While for a commercial on TV I usually know what was the range and frequency, for an online ad with Google AdWords I can find out how many conversions have also been generated, that is how many people have come to the desired action, and in some cases can also calculate the true gain that the Internet advertising has generated. By that way I can know how much gain every euro from the budget has generated.
You can precisely control the efficiency of the advertising campaign on the Internet and the ROI thanks to the Google AdWords conversion tracking tools. These allow you to know how many and which clicks have led to a page that is considered significant and how many steps have been taken by the user to achieve the result. And if a user has clicked on three days ago and made a purchase today? It is possible to monitor the behavior of users (if they have not deleted the data from the cache memory of the browser), even after several days and weeks.
What’s the value of conversions? If your site sells only one product is simple: each conversion is worth the net gain of the product and the code for tracking conversions can be inserted in the thank you page. When it comes to e-commerce with many different products, it can be inserted into a plug in that dynamically communicates with the Google AdWords account and returns precise indications on the gain arising from any derivative transaction from online ads. If the conversion is represented by inclusion in a newsletter, a contact form or by the impression of a single page, you must manually assign a value to the action that should be measured in relation to the overall marketing strategy.
In this way we will have specific information about the revenue generated from advertising with Google AdWords. It’s simple to define the ROI : it is the ratio between the net revenue and expenditure of the advertising campaign. To maximize your investment and make sure that your budget get the best possible results, you should look for a professional with the Google AdWords qualification.
