PPC search engines provide a highly trackable marketing medium. Frequently people begin marketing without any idea as to the approximate value of a click. If you do not set up a value range and track the results you have no way to distinguish good marketing from bad marketing.
In SEO To know the value of a click, you need to decide what the goal of your marketing is. If you are just branding, then you should expect to lose money to gain mindshare or reinforce your brand, and tracking may not be that important. If you are using pay-per-click search engines for direct product marketing, you need to know how much each click is worth.
Before You Start:
It is a good idea to look at the various ads which are displayed in which order over time. The top guy might be an idiot losing tons of money or a person who is paying an extreme premium for branding.
If ads from affiliate marketers or smaller sites are ranking around the same ad position over the course of a few weeks to a month then they are probably doing something right (generating profits). It is worth it to take a couple weeks to do deep keyword research and market analysis before jumping into pay per click search engine marketing.
Why Pay Per Click is Important:
I was working to raise the rankings of one client for a few competitive phrases. It was taking a decent investment in time and money. I then started a pay per click campaign to test a ton of terms. As it turns out the conversion rate for the words we thought we needed were not great. There were a couple other terms with lower search frequency and less competition which converted exceptionally well.
