Cost Per Action : Measure the Real Impact of your Search Engine Marketing

Cost-per-action measures the cost of a predefined interaction or transaction on the landing page of your website. To measure the cost per action you will need to have conversion tracking enabled have defined what counts as an action. This can be one of a number of actins:

• Visit a dedicated page
• Spend time on the landing page
• Sign up for updates or free trial
• Buy a product or service

When one of these actions is triggered by a visitor originating from a search engine marketing ad click, the conversion tracking system can then calculate the average cost-per-action from the aggregated statistics.
This allows you to identify the keywords with the highest conversion and focus your investment on them. It also helps to identify less relevant keywords that might bring sizeable amount of traffic but for which the conversion rate is too low, thus the cost-per-action price is too high.