An important phase of executing a successful Pay Per Click campaign is to have a system in place that will find out how successful the campaign is. Tracking can effectively do this. It will tell you if any part of your campaign is not as effective as it should be and what needs to be done to rectify the problem area. Tracking will assist in understanding your website better. It also helps in understanding the customers and gives an insight into how they use the website. Customers have their own way of using the website, no matter how well intentioned your designing is.

Aspects To Be Tracked
The objectives of the PPC campaign must be clear at the outset. It may be to sell a product or service online and you are interested in tracking the number of queries from your website. Alternately, if in your campaign you have specific landing pages for each advertisement, a measure of the number of conversions from visitors to the pages is an indicator of the customer"s preferences while visiting the site. Thus, what you track will depend entirely on the goals of the PPC campaign. Needless to add, a close monitoring will ensure that the campaign is a success.

Tracking PPC Conversions
There are essentially 3 techniques to track the effectiveness of your PPC campaign:
1. Sites like Yahoo and Google offer free services with their search marketing products and Adwords. These give the total cost of the PPC campaign, conversions and other important measurables like clicks, click through rate and cost per click.
2. Commonly available software like "Click Tracks" analyses your web logs. Based on this analysis, it gives detailed information on visits to the site. This includes those who come through PPC or through organic listings.
3. Another way of tracking is to press the off switch and then turn it on again. Obviously, this is a rather crude method and not one that is recommended.

Tracking your PPC campaign can take a long time to work out and is a challenging task. With an efficient and well-thought out tracking system in place, it becomes easier to understand what your customers are looking for when they visit your website. This will give you a valuable insight into ways to improve your search engine marketing campaign, with associated spin-offs in terms of a better ROI.