There are a number of factors which limit the accuracy of typical PPC Expense/Revenue reports.

Deleted Cookies or other internet issues – Everyone doing business online has learned that all tracking has some significant limitations, which impact accuracy from a little (5% is considered typical) to a lot (cookie deletion rates have been reported in excess [...]

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Paid search reports are wrong. Inaccurate. Mis-leading.
Do not mean what you think they mean.
Do you know why?
First right answer in the comments wins a $50 iTunes gift certificate.
Here’s the statement that must be explained:
“A December 2007 PPC Expense/Revenue report pulled from either the paid search engine management consoles or your web analytics software will not [...]

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Negative keywords are an important part of designing any paid search campaign. They’re also often overlooked and frequently under utilized.
Looking at search query reports on a campaign, ad-group, or keyword level certainly makes it clear that without the right negatives, you’re paying for a lot of clicks that just don’t have any chance of converting.
But [...]

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Keywords are over-rated.
The vast majority of paid search marketers track clicks and results (usually conversions) and tune their keywords as a result. They bid keywords up or down, perhaps even pause or delete them, as if the keyword was responsible for the result.
But the user frequently wasn’t searching for, or thinking about, the keyword.
They were [...]

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One good question left in the comments of our ‘Keywords and Queries’ post was: Can’t you get query-by-keyword info from the Google Adwords ‘Search Query Performance’ report?
The Search Query Performance report is the closest thing you can get from Google, or any of the engines as far as I’m aware, but it has several limitations.
First, [...]

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You buy keywords to run paid search ads. Users type keywords into search engines to perform searches. It’s easy to forget that they’re not the same things.
I’ve taken to calling the ones you buy ‘keywords’ and the ones people type ‘queries’. And about 100 times a week in one conversation or another I have to [...]

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Onlynaturalpet.com makes money from their paid search marketing campaigns. Not just ROAS, but actual profit.
The amazing thing isn’t that it’s true. It’s that we know it.
We know exactly how much profit and where it comes from. Which engines. Which campaigns. Which ad-groups. Which keywords.
This is unusual because the search engines reporting systems, and most analytics [...]

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It is very clear, to us anyway, that paid search has too many moving parts, too much mathematical complexity, and such a total lack of environmental stability, that attempting to optimize or maximize results without the assistance of some pretty serious software is a futile exercise.
But does that mean a reasonable goal is a black [...]

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One small but important step in our setup of Onlynaturalpet.com is to configure their Omniture SiteCatalyst implementation to correctly assign revenue credit for search keywords.
As you probably know, many people execute several searches, often over the course of several days, clicking on different paid keywords along the way before finally making that purchase.
When this happens, [...]

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It’s always interesting to take a look inside an existing paid search account for the first time. If you know what to look for it’s easy to get a pretty quick sense for the depth and quality of the existing campaigns.
When we review an account, we want to take a look at the campaigns and [...]

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