Ongoing account management
Unlike conventional forms of advertising, where you develop your creative, unleash it on the world, and wait for the results to come in, PPC advertising is an immediate and ongoing medium.
You can see the results of your ad copy within a day, at least in terms of how popular the copy is, and be adjusting things on a regular basis to try and achieve the right balance between CTR and CPC.
We recommend the use of specifically-developed "landing pages" for data capture purposes. "Landing pages" are the page the site visitor arrives at once they've clicked the ad. If you set up a unique page that is only arrived at via the PPC ads, you can implement some form of data capture system, through asking the site visitor for their email address or other contact details as soon as they get to the site.
This data capture should be in the form of a trade - such that the site visitor gains something of value for handing over their email address. Examples of ideas that could work here would be:
Access to a unique area of the site
Signup for alerts for when the site is updated with new info on the topic they're interested in
Whitepapers / newsletters that are sent to them on receipt of their contact details
This process allows for even better refinement of the ongoing PPC management process, as you could set up a unique landing page per ad, then track its effectiveness in capturing the data.
On an ongoing basis, you can then monitor and measure the results of changes to both the ad copy and the landing page, leading to a process of continual improvement.