SEO/PPC Success Measures and KPI's

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How do you know when SEO (search engine optimization) is working?
When you get not just rankings for desired terms, but also traffic and business results.  If you choose the right terms ahead of time, you're more likely to get those business results, but you have to monitor with analytics and modify your targets and tactics as you go.  Specific keywords' rankings may go up and down from month to month, but an SEO campaign should be judged as a whole in terms of business results and overall trends.

How do you know when your PPC is a success?
PPC like SEO is a staged iterative effort.  There are certain basics to start with like target keywords and budget parameters, but you also have to put conversion tracking in place on your most wanted responses (you do have MWR's don't you?), and have analytics like omniture or google analytics in place so you can measure results.

You start with a goal like "spend the budget on relevant keywords" and then later modify it to "find out what keywords and ads get the best results".  As time goes on, you amplify what's working and eliminate what isn't.  You spend more on high ROAS keywords and delete the ones that aren't working. 

Success depends on what your goals are, and your goals will change as your PPC campaign matures.  You can't run before you walk; you can't optimize for ROAS before you track conversions, and before that you have to get enough qualified traffic to get the stats that allow you to optimize.

What's the ideal PPC campaign like?
The ideal PPC campaign focuses on getting a specific MWR (most wanted response) from a target demographic.  You manage a budget to spend getting clicks from target keywords, geography, time of day, and day of week.  You conceive and test ads to elicit the MWR from your audience.  You optimize to eliminate keywords, locations, times, and ad messages that do not elicit the MWR.  You use quantifiable results (stats and metrics) to navigate a sea of semantic indicators (keywords).  You optimize according to the best KPI (key performance indicator) you can get data for.

What's the best PPC KPI?
As described above, your success measures should change as your campaign matures.  You may start with total ad spend (make sure you can spend it), CPC (cost per click- lower it as much as possible) and CTR (click through rate- increase it), but later move CPA (cost per action/acquisition) or ROAS (return on ad spend) and later to overall profit.  Campaigns where the conversion goal is a lead utimately go by CPA, and campaigns that measure revenue results go by ROAS and profit.

What's the ideal PPC client like?
The ideal PPC client:

• Has a MWR,
  
• Has or develops specific landing pages,
  
• Cooperates to include conversion tracking and analytics,
  
• Suggests keywords and ad copy, even dictates branding keywords, but does not try to micro-manage the campaign,
  
• Lets us optimize according to their desired results and the data we see.