Pay per click marketing is an important part of your online marketing strategy, but how do you know if what you are doing is getting any results? Learning how to measure the effectiveness of PPC campaigns is a relatively simple process but it does require some basic knowledge about how SEO and PPC work, and access to web analytics tools. Here are some simple ways to measure the effectiveness of PPC campaigns:

1. Integrate PPC with your web analytics tool. Avinash Kaushik, author of the book "Web Analytics: An Hour a Day" recommends using several web analytics tools and integrating your PPC data into it to measure the effectiveness of your campaign. Kaushik points out that it's important to have access to the backend of your analytics tools so you know exactly what is happening behind the scenes (instead of paying an SEM agency to do this for you as a service).

2. Identify your key performance indicators. Get the specifics on what element generated income for you. Was it the click to a sales page (a lead capture)? Was it the payment for a transaction? Itemizing what the performance indicator is in your Pay Per Click campaign will allow you to assess and track user behavior so that you can focus on what element actually makes you earn.

3. Keep track of your unique visitors. Unique visitor counts will vary significantly by campaign, and you will need to know exactly how much it cost to attract these visitors, even if they didn't complete a purchase or submit their information. The reason why this is important is because you need to know if the campaign is working. If people are only clicking through to the site but not converting, you may be targeting the wrong keywords.

4. Check it with a split test. To define which the most efficient keywords and key phrases, you can apply a technique that is often used by internet marketers. A split test can be done by placing the same ad on three different ad service providers. By the results you can see which ad service provider gives you the most clicks and how your audience finds your site. This will show you the trend and help you decide which is the best one to give you advertising business to.

5. Know the cost of each acquisition. When you know how many visitors your website has and how many of them actually generate you income, you can accurately compute the individual acquisition cost of your campaign. This will tell you exactly how much you have spent to get a sale. Then, you can calculate the average selling price and study your ROI.

Measuring the effectiveness of your pay per click marketing strategy can take time and you will need to tweak it as you go along. Still, it's a process that every savvy marketer needs to go through in order to optimize their ads and get the highest conversions from each and every campaign.

Advertising with Google Adwords is a powerful technique that most websites can use to attract more sales. Writing quality Google Ads is one of the most important skills to have when using Adwords - and there are several good training resources available online.