Get The Most For Your PPC Buck
Many Internet businesses at some point use pay-per-click (PPC) advertising as part of their overall marketing strategy. Much of the time these businesses hope that the increase in revenue will be at least enough to pay for the advertising and, perhaps, even create additional profit. Some other businesses use these advertising campaigns with the primary objective of building their list of leads so that they may gradually build a relationship with the prospects that will eventually create some of them into customers. Still other times, the focus of some Internet marketers during a PPC campaign includes using the data that they collect for research and planning purposes.
I am writing this article to draw your attention to using pay-per-click as a research tool (Of course this assumes that you already know how to conduct thorough keyword research prior to launching your advertising campaigns.
* Tracking software, such as the free Google Analytics and may commercial packages, will provide you with the exact key phrase used by all of your visitors to get to your PPC landing pages. Obviously, if you set up your campaign properly, you know which of the phrases that you bid on are bringing the visitors, however, unless you are using only exact match phrases, that does not alert you to the precise search terms entered by your traffic. For example, bidding on a term such as “buy green lamp” set up as a broad match, would get traffic from people who searched for phrases such as “buy a used green lamp in Columbus or Dover,” “buy green lamp,” “buy a green lamp in need of repairs,” “buy expensive tiffany green lamp” and many more. Any traffic you receive would be looking to buy some sort of green lamp. Based upon the search phrases that your discover and the number of people you identify using them, you may want to create new permanent pages for your site stressing those phrases. If you then optimize those pages for those phrases, you can eventually get organic traffic for those searches. This effectively allows you to spread the cost of your pay-per-click campaign across many years.
* Test your headings (headlines) on your PPC landing pages. Set up two pages for the same ad group. The pages should be identical in every other way except for the heading. It’s possible to set up some content management systems to do this or buy inexpensive software to alternate the pages for you. If not, allow a number of clicks (maybe 100) to land on one version, then manually change the landing page to the other version. Look at the data you gather concerning the results of the two versions according to whatever metric you are using (e.g. sales or leads). If there is a clear winner, keep it in the rotation and set up another test with a different alteration in the heading.
* Conduct the same format test as with headlines, but test a different variable. You may want to test listing benefits followed by features versus having the features list come before the benefits. Or you could test one page with an image and another that has a short video display.
As you perform the tests on the content of your landing pages, be certain that you do not change more than one variable at a time. Do not change both the headline and the image at the same time, or it will be difficult for you to determine which variable it is that makes the difference in your conversion results or the relative impact of each. (Actually, if you have some statistical sophistication, you can set up a test in which you change multiple variables at once across multiple versions of the landing page.)
The main point to go away from this is that you should be using your PPC campaigns to do considerably more than bring visitors to your site and hope that they will buy something. Get as much out of the money that you are spending as possible. Gather data, analyze it, and act decisively and immediately based upon your findings!
