Tracking campaign effectiveness would be easier if marketing campaigns drove traffic and referrals back through a single channel, but this is rarely the case. Consumers can do any number of things when marketing influences them into action, and this makes tracking complicated. This is especially true when referrals take the form of phone calls, which can only be accurately measured by analytics through a call-tracking solution.

What is call tracking? In the simplest terms, it's a way of seeing which ad campaigns are driving calls to your business. As smartphones create a seamless experience that melds phone capabilities with online search and mobile browsers, call tracking lets you get more reliable data from your campaigns. Without it, your company could be saddled with distorted readouts of how your digital campaigns are performing. But this simple functionality also provides valuable insights into the behaviors of your consumer base, helping you tweak your marketing style in the future.

When crafting a paid search strategy, marketers need to research keywords, craft an effective call-to-action and target specific demographics. Along with these components, having a solid social media strategy is crucial for several reasons that marketers might not initially consider.

Social Media as a Center of Information

Though consumers can visit your brand's official website to learn about your products or make purchases and get in touch with you, research shows that they place a growing value on social media profiles as a source of information. In fact, a recent study reported on by PR Week revealed that 50 percent of consumers searching for information on a brand look at its Facebook page first. Even if you have a paid search campaign that links directly to your website, it's vital that your social networking profiles — including Facebook and Twitter — are updated and include information relevant to your paid search campaign.

Both inbound marketing and paid search are important components of any digital strategy, but where and how they intersect with one another isn't always so clear. Inbound sometimes seems to function as its own campaign, separate from other strategies, whereas paid search often serves as the fraternal twin of search engine optimization (SEO).

But in the digital sphere, individual campaigns always get a boost when partnered with other distinct campaigns as a form of cross-channel marketing. A successful pairing of digital tools can bring significant gains, both in terms of leads and conversions. Here's a quick rundown of what paid search has to offer inbound marketing.

Paid Search Guarantees Visibility

Inbound marketing requires an audience, which is achieved through a number of marketing channels. Social, SEO, email and, yes, paid search all have a hand in driving traffic that creates sales opportunities, according to Search Engine Watch. When you attach paid search to an inbound strategy, you guarantee exposure for the content you're publishing while giving it viable prospects to work with. Paid ads also give you the flexibility to choose the type of content displayed.

It's easy for marketers to see online ads as a driving force for online sales and traditional ads as a way to create physical conversion, but it no longer works that way. Online ads now play a big role in driving customers to physical stores, so creating these marketing divisions can actually harm overall sales. A new Google tool aims to help marketers understand how their online ads are impacting conversions in stores, and it could change the way many businesses think about the success of their ads.

The New Google Metrics Feature

Just a few weeks ago, Google added a new metric called "store visit measurement" to its Estimated Total Conversions (ETC) tool. This metric helps give AdWords users a window into how digital ads might be driving in-store visits, not just clicks and digital conversions.

When you're looking to increase search-driven traffic, it's easy to focus on a single element of your marketing campaign in the hopes of honing your overall strategy. However, by using SEO, SEM and traditional media together, you can organically drive search results and boost traffic, both immediately and over the long term.

Using Traditional Media to Draw Consumers In

Traditional media offers marketers a great way to spark initial consumer interest, which can lead to increased search traffic. Advertising through TV and other traditional media affords marketers the opportunity to pique consumer interest in a way that encourages search activity later on through the use of specific, search-engine-friendly keywords. MediaPost highlights the adults aged 25–54 demographic as one that is particularly inclined to perform searches after seeing an ad on television that contains easily searchable phrases and keywords and cites local news broadcasts as an area where ads looking to drive search results have been very effective. Though you certainly don't want to create ambiguous ads that don't give consumers enough information to care, it's important to craft ads for radio, print and television that invite the consumer to search for additional information in such a way as to lead back to you through a strong SEO and SEM campaign.

When it comes to pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, keeping up with the digital trends is key to your successful paid search campaign. This includes considering algorithm updates, the plethora of social media sites and the big shift to mobile commerce — Pew reports that 63 percent of adult cell owners use their phones to go online.

In case you missed them, here are some trends you need to know about from 2014 and trends to look out for in 2015.

How PPC Marketing Changed in 2014

• Simplicity. This year saw the demise of digital bling. Big, flashy banners might as well be a stop sign, especially in a mobile world where they signal bulky downloads and complicated landing pages. The shift has been toward simplicity, clear CTAs and direct messages.
  
  
• Social. Changes in social media platforms have given you great opportunities to get your brand in front of your target customer. But promoted tweets and Facebook's algorithms are changing how often your fans or followers see your posts. A paid social media campaign has become an essential tool in any digital advertising campaign.
  
  
• Mobile. Marketing Land reports that 37 percent of all Web traffic comes from mobile, which indicates that users are increasingly viewing ads on their mobile devices. Mobile-optimized sites are gaining visibility, but getting ahead of this trend is imperative going into 2015.

Even if you are getting traffic to your site from organic search, you should consider paid search engine marketing, or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. These are ads for your company that appear at the top or to the right in the search engine results page (SERP) when a customer searches for products or services that you offer. It works by letting you bid on keywords relevant to your business (for example, through Google AdWords), displaying your targeted ad when people search for that term. It gives you a boost, potentially pushing your business to the front page despite your organic search rankings. And what's more, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.

Here are five best practices for developing an effective PPC campaign for your business.

Keywords

The effectiveness of PPC depends on your choice of keywords, which means you should know who your target customer is and which words they'll use to search for your products. Then bid on these keywords — which, of course, should be closely related to your product offerings. Instead of relying on historically used words, think about your customer and your products to give yourself a competitive edge. There are also tools, like Google's Keyword Planner, that you can use to do research for keyword ideas.

Shopping campaigns are emerging as one of the premiere paid search products for businesses looking to expand their reach. However, it's easy to feel overwhelmed when designing one, especially since switching from a simpler product listing ad campaign to a more comprehensive shopping campaign can be time consuming. Search Engine Land reports that many marketers were surprised by some of the pitfalls they experienced transitioning from traditional product listing ads to shopping campaigns. Keeping these three things in mind when developing your paid search shopping campaign will ensure that you start off on the right track and can meet challenges as they come.

Competing in the digital realm can be tough, but some marketing directors are further handicapped by resistance from management. You might understand the importance of diversified digital marketing strategies and have a keen understanding of PPC best practices, but what good is it if your boss won't green-light your paid search spending?

We understand that frustration. The sales pitch is key to getting your boss's backing, but the most successful arguments won't take a marketer's perspective — they'll speak the language of your boss and present PPC best practices in a way that matters to him or her. Here are some tips for convincing your boss of the importance of paid search.

When you launch a search engine marketing (SEM) campaign, success can be difficult to measure. Every business is different, and therefore campaign goals will be different. First, define conversion goals you can measure. Then you can look at the conversion tracking data in front of you and make informed decisions about your current campaign and about future campaigns.

Getting Started: Understanding Conversions

A conversion is, put very simply, any meaningful interaction with a product gained from marketing efforts. In the world of SEM, that can mean a visit to a business' home page, a like on Facebook, or even a viewing of a single product page. Though you might be tempted to narrow their definition of conversion to something like verified sales or app downloads, by broadening the definition, you can look at big picture trends and make significant marketing moves with legitimate data to back up your efforts.