Before I discuss why you should build a data warehouse, let's make sure we are clear what a data warehouse is. I spent several years at Oracle, so I was very familiar with databases and building data warehouses.

Essentially, a data warehouse is a big database. It's a place where all your data can be stored for years and years and years.

An incredibly important, and often overlooked, aspect of measuring the effectiveness of your online advertising is using profit as your guiding metric. So what does that mean?

To understand this, I first want to point out how the other metrics that most online advertisers are using today, including ROI, conversion rate, etc., are flawed. I want to work through an example here that will demonstrate why profit is the best metric to use when making online advertising decisions.

Let's first talk about why you should implement an alert system. First, large and sophisticated companies' PPC campaigns probably contain tens of thousands of keywords. Keeping your eyes on this many keywords times multiple search engines, and, perhaps, other forms of advertising, is virtually impossible to manage on a daily basis.

If every day, you have to comb through all ten thousand keywords (or multiples of that) to figure out what's working and what's not, there's just too much time spent on the data collection and analysis, and not enough time spent on actual "needle moving" improvement opportunities.

This is a disciplined methodology to ensure we are systemically improving the profitability of our customers online advertising investment. It's a methodology that we apply to sophisticated advertisers to earn the maximum profit for them that we possibly can. It's a five step methodology, which I will breakdown in greater detail throughout this article.

Most companies are shocked when I say that their branded ad is not as valuable as they think. Many wonder,

All large companies do some percentage of sales over the phone. If you are unable to tell where that phone call came from, and I'm not talking about knowing it came from your Web site or even knowing that it came from Yahoo versus Google, it's not good enough. You need to know specifically which keyword was involved in bringing that visitor to your Web site.

To start off, let's talk about what the ideal strategy would be or what the ideal tool would look like for creating new keywords and negatives. I, personally, would love a tool that could recommend a keyword to me and accurately tell me what the ROI on that keyword is before I implement it. Wouldn't that be ideal?

Sorry, but that keyword tool doesn't exist.