PPC Management Question

[tombarr]

PPC advertising is obviously here to stay. It was laughed at a few years ago by industry pundits, but is now the measure and means of many successful ad campaigns....however, as your ad program needs get larger, and you need to hit more keywords across more PPC engines... the more complex it becomes to manage and track the program and massage it as needed to yield optimum CPC vs. CPA and ROI.

I have tried to find a third party management solution that will accomplish management of unlimited keywords on the most popular PPC engines (google, overture, miva, etc.) and find several applications both online and client side. One major drawback is that most are very expensive and give you graduated cost scales for the number of clicks you purchase. Another is that a lot of PPC management solutions do not allow the adult business model as clients..or that allow gay adult clients...

Does anyone here use, or know of a solution, online or otherwise that can do these things and track sales all the way through to the completion of purchase, with reporting that breaks it down by engine, keyword, etc.?

we are in the process of developing one through our coding team, but woudl sure love to be able to short circuit the development cycle if one off the shelf was available.

any suggested solutions?

[tombarr]

wow, no comments on this. maybe i was too wordy, giving too much background before i got to the actual question and put everyone to sleep..

let me simplify the question..

What do you use to manage your pay per click ad campaigns?

do you wing it, just guessing at it's returns and cost per actual sale?

do you have custom programming that you use to track your ads and sales from pay per click advertising?

do you use an off the shelf program to manage your pay per click program?

[robin]

Off hand I haven't noticed any that fit the bill.

I used to be fanatical about this figuring roi but I'll admit that lately I've been pretty loose in tracking and figuring out roi on my campaigns. I do keep an eye on them for a kinda ball park roi.

As an affiliate it gets kinda crazy tracking down the info I need for this type of thing. I've found that there just isn't enough hours in the day for me to do this by myself.

If things are going poorley then I look into the whys of it.