Not using an analytics program to track your Pay-Per-Click (sometimes referred to as Cost-Per-Click) campaigns is like trying to find a black dog at night, so to speak.

I recently did a consult for a company that was spending a significant amount of money (for a small company) with Google Adwords. They showed me their keywords list, which was fairly extensive, but they had no way of tracking conversions.

I’m here to tell you this is an absolute killer. Most people that do this usually end up giving up on PPC because they can’t get it to make money.

I prefer to use Google Analytics to track my campaigns mostly because its free, and it automatically tracks all your Adwords cost and ROI (return-on-investment) data. There are some others out there though. My tin-foil-hat friend is of the theory that Google might just use this data to increase your bid amounts. In other words, he doesn’t want the fox guarding the hen house. I haven’t seen any indication of this, so I use Google Analytics for now, but I’m keeping my eyes peeled.

If you’re not tracking your PPC campaigns you could have a keyword that is costing you a huge percent of your spend without any return. Most analytics programs allow you to drill down to specific keywords and tell you what the cost is and what the return is. This not only allows you to kill the keywords that are bleeding money, but also allows you to refine and A/B test ads to increase your ROI significantly. Look into implementing some sort of PPC tracking soon, because I guarantee you that you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.

In the coming weeks I’ll give all you affiliate marketers some tips on what you can do to set up analytics to track your ROI, since the sale doesn’t actually take place on your own site.