What Defines a High Performing PPC Campaign?

Conversions, Leads, Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), Return on Adspend (ROAS or ROI). There is no definite answer to this question, however too many people use conversions as the factor of their success. Conversions are great, but do NOT define a successful campaign. There is another factor involved that is needed before you decide the conversion was worth it. You need the revenue that conversion generated and the cost of the ad that brought the customer to your site.
For example, you normally get 100 conversions a week at a cost of $500. First question to ask is, how much revenue did the 100 conversions bring in? If you sold $300 worth of products and spent $500 on the ads, you are losing money. If you increase these types of conversions, you will keep increasing your losses. You can even bring it down to the keyword level and find out that out of the 100 conversions, only 3 keywords where converting. Word A cost $100 and brought in $400 in revenue, the other 2 words cost $200 and brought in $100 in revenue. Take Word A and expand upon it, find 2 and 3 keyword phrases and similar words to increase your ROI. Decrease position or remove the other 2 words.
Getting this information can be costly. Some programs, like Yahoo’s Marketing Console, cost around $150 per month for a smaller site, but well worth it.

Correct Paid Search Landing Pages

Have your paid Search account all set up? You have all of your keywords going to your home page don't you?
If you are selling specific products, your keywords should go to that specific landing page. You sell cast iron mailboxes, your cast iron mailbox keyword should send customer directly to the cast iron mailbox page. The only time I have seen higher conversions going to a companies home page (and it is not consitent so feel free to test), is for informational lead generation sites. It appears customers want to find out more about you before they buy. They end up going to home page and researching other pages before filling out your forms.

Tracking Phone Calls in Paid Search

Actually you can track the calls coming in. As a matter of fact, you can track the keyword someone used to make the call, the search engine the caller used, and record to the call to listen to later. A service called Who's Calling, http://www.whoscalling.com/ , can do all of that fo you. In one instance, a business records the calls on his iPod, listens on his way home and to work. He found customers asking the same questions, he listened to employees that had higher conversion rates and compared them to others. With this information he added to his training and placed more copy on his site to answer more questions. His conversions went up close to 30%.

You may have also heard that Google is testing a similar type service http://www.google.com/help/faq_clicktocall.html . I think they have a lot of work ahead of them. Google's service will bring up an ad (like a pay per click ad) in a listing where you add your phone number and the company will call you back. The problem I see with this already is with phoney phone calls. From what I have seen, there is nothing in place to prevent people from putting in someone else's phone number. At least it will keep the teenagers busy :)