How can I tell if my ads are getting clicked on?

The LookSmart AdCenter has a feature called Custom Reporting that lets you see just how many visitors you've reached with your pay-per-click text ads.

Each time your ad appears on one of the sites in LookSmart's network, your future customers have the opportunity to click on that ad to check out your offer.  Custom reporting tells you how many prospects did this and for which of your campaigns or keywords.

Custom reports come in a variety of forms (see Figure 1 for an example):

• Account reports give you a aggregate view of all of your clicks from all of your open accounts.  If you have only one account, the Campaign and Keyword reports will provide information specific to campaign and keyword clicks.
• Campaign reports show total clicks and costs for each of your campaigns.  This report is a great way to get status on all of your efforts to reach new customers.
• Keyword reports show you performance detail down to the targeting level.  LookSmart supports keyword targeting for search results pages, and contextual targeting for content pages your prospects visit.  Use this report when it's time to optimize your campaigns at a very detailed level.

Custom reporting helps you figure out how well your advertising as doing and can give you insights into where you need to spend time optimizing your ad copy, changing your keywords, or modifying your bids.  In our next blog post, we'll look at ways to improve your keyword targets to get more visitors to your web site.

Allen Hammock
Product Marketing Manager
allen.hammock@looksmart.net

Figure 1: Custom Reports