PPC Advertising, such as with Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing, can be a great method for getting visitors to your websites. It’s highly focused because you can tailor your ads to be triggered on specific keywords or search phrases. This brings potential customers straight to you.
With PPC, if someone clicks your ad then they are already showing some interest in what you have to offer. You have a good chance of ‘converting’ them into a customer as long as your ad wasn’t misleading, and your webpage shows them want they want to see.
Mind you, using pay per click can be pricey if you aren’t careful with what you do. This is especially true if you are just getting started with marketing online or have limited experience.
Make sure you take the following points into consideration before embarking on a campaign.
1. Your Website needs to be able convert visitors into customers. You can send all the traffic in the world to your website, but unless you have a clear and enticing product or message, all that money you spend on clicks to your landing page will not transpose into conversions. It sounds obvious (and it is!) but so many internet marketing newbies make the mistake of skimping on the time and money to create a website which converts.
2. Group your keywords into tight ad groups so that your ads are relevant to the keywords people are searching on. Say for example you have a website which sells various makes and model of car. You should group your keywords based on make and/or model. So, people searching for “Volvo” will see ads relating to that car and not to “Ford” or “BMW”. Making your ads relevant to the search will dramatically improve your CTR (Click Thru Rate).
3. Send ‘clickers’ to a relevant landing page. Continuing on from the point above, if customers click an ad relating to “Audi” or “Dyson” or “VISA”, you will have low conversions if you send them to pages relating to “Mercedes”, “Hoover” or “American Express”.
4. You need to split test. This is the process of testing multiple versions of the same page. You might change the layout, the copy (wording), even the color of the background. All of these may have an effect on increasing or reducing the conversion rate of your site. There are guidelines, but really there is no certain way of being sure what will have the greatest impact without doing this kind of testing.
5. Don’t pause your campaign too early. The biggest mistake newbies make is to not allocate enough money just for the purpose of testing. I can pretty much guarantee that you won’t make money from the start. You need to test and tweak and continue doing that until your campaign is profitable.
Running a PPC campaign can be a very lucrative way of marketing online, but don’t give up too early, and don’t expect to make a profit from the outset. Keep testing and tweaking!
Want to find out more information about Beating Adwords, then visit Nick’s site and get an awesome Beating Adwords Bonus too.