Pay Per Click Search

Get the Most For Your PPC Dollar

Posted on 01. Jul, 2009 by admin in Make Money Online, PPC Marketing

Many Internet marketers eventually 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 sufficient to pay for the advertising andeven create additional profit.  Other times they look to recover those expenses over a longer period by using the PPC campaign as a means of obtaining leads that they use to develop a lasting relationship with new prospects.  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.  

It is this last approach to pay-per-click that I want to address in this article.  Here are a few very useful tests that you can incorporate into your next PPC campaign.  I am already assuming that you have performed superb keyword research.

*  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.  If you set up your advertising campaign so that each ad group (group of related keywords) delivers traffic to a separate landing page, you will know only what words have been included in the users search phrase, but you won’t know the exact phrase (unless you use only exact match keywords).  As a simple, if lengthy, example, let’s say that you bid on a broad match phrase such as, “lamp green buy.”  (Of course, you would have the quotation marks around those words, if it is a broad match.)  You could have individual visitors who searched for “buy expensive tiffany lamp,” “buy a used green lamp in Atlanta or Marietta,” buy a green or yellow ceramic lamp” and other phrases.  Clearly those visitors are looking for very different sorts of green lamps to buy.  You probably do not sell all of those that your visitors want.  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.  It’s possible to set up some content management systems to do this or buy inexpensive software to alternate the pages for you.  It’s also very easy to simply change the landing page to the different version within your ad after you have received a sufficient number of clicks to provide your with useful data—at least 100 clicks.  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.  For example, you may want to test two different product images against each other.  Or you could test one page with an image and another that has a short video display.  

Make sure that on each of the content related tests you are only changing one variable.  If you alter both the image and the headline at the same time, for example, you will have difficulty determining which variable is responsible for any changes in the results or what the relative impact of each is compared to the other.  (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 take 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.  PPC can be very costly, so maximize your benefits from those dollars to accomplish as much as you possibly can.  Gather data, analyze it, and act decisively based upon your findings!

Tags: pay-per-click-search-engine-reviews, pay-per-click-directories, keywords, pay-per-click-tracking, pay-per-click-tools

This post was syndicated with Article Marketing Automation.
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Tags: advertising, analytics, applied research, internet marketing, marketing research, Pay Per Click, ppc, tracking keywords

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