How do I know that a "conversion" came from our PPC ads, rather than just from our organic search?

All PPC platforms use cookies to track users who perform conversions, so they’ll only count a “conversion” if a visitor comes through an ad (not if they come through other means). 

What types of actions can we track from PPC campaigns?

Almost anything, but some things are tracked more easily than others.

For example: tracking form submissions. If the form redirects to a thank-you page, this becomes quite easy to track because we can just place some conversion code on the thank-you page, and it will register a conversion a single time when a visitor comes through an ad and then sees that page.

But what if you don’t want a thank-you page, and instead just want to track when someone clicks the submit button? We can do that, with a caveat – what if the person clicks the button more than once? What if they hit the “enter” key on their keyboard instead of clicking? These would skew our numbers. That’s why we really really prefer to use thank-you pages to track most conversions.

Other types of things we can track as conversions (not a complete list):

• Phone Calls (using call tracking, which has an additional cost to pay for the CallRail software subscription)
• Purchases (with revenue data included, so we can track exact amounts of revenue generated)
• Add to cart
• Form submissions
• Engaged users (users that visit many pages, or scroll all the way down a page, or stay on the site for a long time)

I recommend sticking to forms and calls for service-based businesses (and purchases for eCommerce sites).

For particularly large campaigns we can get into the other types of tracking.