Get the Most Bang for Your Pay-Per-Click Buck
Posted on 26. Dec, 2009 by admin in Make Money Online, PPC Marketing
Most marketers on the Internet use PPC (pay-per-click) eventually within their marketing mix. Much of the time these businesses hope that the increase in revenue will be at least sufficient to pay for the advertising andeven create additional profit. Other times they look to recoup those advertising costs over a longer period by using the PPC campaign as a means of obtaining leads that they use to develop a lasting relationship with a prospect. Other marketers focus their PPC campaigns upon gathering research and planning data that will reap benefits for years to come. Of course, none of these objectives need exclude the other.
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.
* Using tracking data, reported by Google Analytics or your own software, identify the exact key phrases used by all of the visitors who come to your landing pages via PPC. 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. You may want to create pages for the key phrases that are applicable (and which seem to be giving you enough traffic to justify the relatively minimal effort). If you then optimize those pages for those phrases, you can eventually get organic traffic for those searches. That can help justify your PPC expense for years to come.
* 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. You might have a content management system or software that can alternate those. 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 one version clearly out performs the other, then keep that version and begin to test it against another altered headline. Keep doing that until you are sure that you have come up with the world’s best possible headline for that page.
* Next, use the same test format as with the heading tests to vary a totally different content 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 more than bring visitors to your site and hope that they will buy something. PPC can be very costly, so maximize your benefits from those dollars to accomplish as much as possible. Test, analyze and use the data!
Tags: internet-marketing, adwords-secrets, pay-per-click-search-advertising, make-money, pay-per-click-search-engine-reviews
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