Anyone that has worked in SEO in any capacity knows that it's a complex business and you learn something new just about every day. But the ultimate SEO goal is easily defined: improved search rankings. It's challenging and somewhat frustrating because of the unknowns of search engines (alright...Google). But at my firm, we have an extremely fine-tuned SEO process that works for us and for our SEO resellers.

PPC, on the other hand, requires much more time to define marketing goals and evaluate whether the website can meet those goals. Most of our clients who sign up for PPC services have very little understanding of how it works. They have a sense that PPC will send traffic to their site, that they'll see a sudden surge in traffic and revenue and that they'll know it's from PPC...somehow. When clients start paying the bill for clicks and there is no obvious return on their investment, you can be sure they'll start to ask questions about what they're getting for their money. So our first order of business is to educate our clients that PPC goals are critical.

We recently had a client that came to us with an informational marketing website to which they simply wanted to drive a high volume of traffic. Their budget was $12k per month. We knew that eventually they'd want some data from the campaign to prove that it was "working." We also knew that if we didn't set a goal, we couldn't prove the value of the campaign. We helped the client identify what they really wanted: not just high volume traffic but high volume QUALITY traffic. And they wanted an extremely low cost-per-click – ultimately $0.50, which is super-low for clicks on Google Adwords! There are no guarantees with PPC but we were reasonably sure that with our expertise, a lot of creativity and a little help from Google Analytics, we could get them there.

We had to use Google Analytics to set up a quantitative "time on site" goal (such a goal cannot be set up in Adwords).

Time on Site Goal in Analytics is under Profile Settings/Goal Settings

We linked goals from Analytics to the client's Adwords campaign and set up conversion tracking.

We set a target cost for qualified visitor (those that met the "time on site" goal) and used CPA (cost per acquisition) bidding.

Adwords CPA bidding option is under the "Settings" tab

Once we had all systems in place, we built a massive campaign with thousands of modified broad match keywords. Then, we let Google drive down the cost per qualified visitor using the keywords that were bringing the quality traffic at or below the targeted CPA.

Our client was able to log in to our reporting dashboard and track the progress of the campaign. He was able to see that the actions we were taking were in fact driving a high volume of quality traffic to his site. And, he was very pleased to see the consistent drop in the average cost-per-click.

HubShout Client Portal where all data on PPC campaigns is reported alongside data from all search marketing and social media campaigns

Some of the most relevant keywords proved to be costly, but we needed some of those keywords to hit our time-on-site goal. We couldn't do that with lower cost, less relevant keywords alone. We built very tight keyword lists and assigned different CPA bids (depending on the quality of the keywords) to each ad group. It was a balancing act but the CPA/time-on-site strategy gave us the data we needed to determine the combination of keywords that would give us the best results. Throughout the duration of the campaign, we never stopped looking for new keywords. Our intensive and ongoing keyword research contributed to our gradual decrease in CPA—we hit upon a significant number of new keywords that helped bring down our average CPA.

We ran numerous ad tests--splitting traffic between the homepage and a category page, setting destination URLs for individual keywords, testing dynamic keyword insertion, testing different headlines and ad copy. We put a great deal of effort into making sure visitors landed on the most relevant page for their search query, increasing the likelihood that they would find what they were looking for and stay on the site. Due to the huge volume of traffic driven by the PPC campaign, we were quickly able to see which ads and landing pages gave us the best time-on-site data.

CPA bidding helped to keep costs under control but we had to keep a very close eye on traffic statistics. A few times, impressions dropped off for no apparent reason, other than...that's the nature of Google! It's important to not panic when you're using CPA bidding. Sudden drastic changes can throw everything off. CPA bidding requires patience so the system can gather data and do the work it's designed to do. From time to time, we did have to increase the bids until the traffic picked back up and then we eased the bids back down.

It took some trial and error with keywords, ad testing and bid adjustment, but in the end, we met our goal of high volume quality traffic at a monthly average of $0.49 per click. Success!

Chad Hill is the CEO and Co-Founder of HubShout, a SEO reseller that offers both software and services to small, medium and large clients. The HubShout white label SEM software platform supports hundreds of clients integrating over 15 relevant data sources at industry-leading prices. The firm also offers SEM services that emphasize both accountability and transparency.