There are several items that you need to track to properly understand and maximize your ROI.

Keyword Cost per Pay Per Click Search Engine
Your ROI tracking starts with knowing how much you are paying for each keyword. You want to be able to track each keyword’s average cost and total cost to compare the numbers against your conversion rates and profits.

Keyword Conversion per Keyword Per Pay Per Click Search Engine

Each keyword performs differently in various pay per click search engines. The demographics of Overture versus Google AdWords users is different, and knowing how your keywords do in each search engine lets you understand how your website converts visitors. A high ROI for a keyword in one search engine, and not the other, might not mean the keyword is not profitable, but you need a different landing page to properly maximize the traffic.

Keyword Position per Conversion Rate & Total Conversions

Knowing which position gained you a higher conversion rate and total conversions is useful for position bidding. You might often find that you have a higher conversion rate with a lower bid, but you will also find you have less total conversions in lower spots. Finding where you can maximize both conversion rate and total conversions will help your pay per click advertising endeavors.

Total Conversions Per Pay Per Click Search Engine

Some companies find that broad keywords have low conversion rates. However, it is no uncommon to find that the total exposure that broad keywords brings can help your overall pay per click performance through total exposure. If you know how well a pay per click search engine is performing for you, and then remove a few keywords, and suddenly your total conversions begin to fall, it could be through the total exposure loss. It is also useful to track total conversions for your website, not just through pay per click advertising, but through all traffic sources, to see if the removal of such a keywords hurts your overall conversions.

Total Conversions & Conversion Percentage by Keyword

By knowing which words are converting well overall, you also have a good place to start with expanding your keyword list with better pay per click keyword research information.

ROAS Per Keyword & Per Search Engine

ROAS stands for return on advertiser spending. In all of the previous examples, knowing your ROAS as well as your conversion rate will help to maximize your pay per click spending.

This is a good statistic to analyze your overall campaign effectiveness for each pay per click search engine. As long as the entire campaign is making money, then you can easily continue to experiment and maximize those campaigns. When a campaign starts to lose money, then its time for serious evaluation of both the pay per click search engine, but the traffic and keywords.

Time Investment

Return on Investment tracking can be a large time investment and bury you in statistics if you are not careful of which ones to closely watch. Sometimes you need to realize they are just numbers and you have to account for human behavior and fluctuations in search traffic and terms to properly understand the statistics and maximize a pay per click account.