Most companies are shocked when I say that their branded ad is not as valuable as they think. Many wonder,

All large companies do some percentage of sales over the phone. If you are unable to tell where that phone call came from, and I'm not talking about knowing it came from your Web site or even knowing that it came from Yahoo versus Google, it's not good enough. You need to know specifically which keyword was involved in bringing that visitor to your Web site.

To start off, let's talk about what the ideal strategy would be or what the ideal tool would look like for creating new keywords and negatives. I, personally, would love a tool that could recommend a keyword to me and accurately tell me what the ROI on that keyword is before I implement it. Wouldn't that be ideal?

Sorry, but that keyword tool doesn't exist.

An incredibly important, and often overlooked, aspect of measuring the effectiveness of your online advertising is using profit as your guiding metric. So what does that mean?

To understand this, I first want to point out how the other metrics that most online advertisers are using today, including ROI, conversion rate, etc., are flawed. I want to work through an example here that will demonstrate why profit is the best metric to use when making online advertising decisions.

Let's first talk about why you should implement an alert system. First, large and sophisticated companies' PPC campaigns probably contain tens of thousands of keywords. Keeping your eyes on this many keywords times multiple search engines, and, perhaps, other forms of advertising, is virtually impossible to manage on a daily basis.

If every day, you have to comb through all ten thousand keywords (or multiples of that) to figure out what's working and what's not, there's just too much time spent on the data collection and analysis, and not enough time spent on actual "needle moving" improvement opportunities.

Before I discuss why you should build a data warehouse, let's make sure we are clear what a data warehouse is. I spent several years at Oracle, so I was very familiar with databases and building data warehouses.

Essentially, a data warehouse is a big database. It's a place where all your data can be stored for years and years and years.

This is a disciplined methodology to ensure we are systemically improving the profitability of our customers online advertising investment. It's a methodology that we apply to sophisticated advertisers to earn the maximum profit for them that we possibly can. It's a five step methodology, which I will breakdown in greater detail throughout this article.

Since the beginning of search engine marketing, search engines have been training their users to focus on achieving a higher click through rate (CTR). The search engines say that an ad with a higher CTR is more 'relevant' and more 'compelling' to searchers, thus it will 'perform' better. Read below to see exactly how the Top 3 search engines speak to this:

MSN: The relevance of your ads affects their performance.

Click Fraud occurs in all forms of media. That may sound like an odd statement, but it is true if you accept this definition of click fraud:

Click Fraud n 1. Paying a rate for media that's based on an invalid metric.

Click Fraud has received tons of attention over the past few years due to the rise of online advertising on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.

The Google Conversion Optimizer has been generating a considerable amount of buzz amongst AdWords advertisers. Google continues to lead the other search engines by providing their customers with tools designed to improve the performance of PPC campaigns. This new tool from Google is another step in the right direction; however, it is not for everybody.

Remember when you used to navigate to a Web site by typing the URL into the address bar? You'd start by typing http. Then, you evolved and skipped using the http and just entered www. Now, you simply go to the search engine of your choice and type the company name you are looking for.

Why did this happen?

1. People Trust Search Engines To Deliver Accurate Results

Back in the day, search engines weren't as reliable as they are today.