Most small, medium and large business, at some time or another, experiment with pay per click (PPC) advertising networks. Smaller businesses tend to utilize PPC programs a less due to time and budget constraints. Larger businesses have more resources to throw at this marketing channel. Whether you're on a tight budget or have endless resources, here are some basic strategies you can follow which will help make your PPC campaigns work for you.
While there are countless tips and tricks for running pay per click campaigns, this guide is focused on the high-level considerations that should go into every campaign. While most of this isn't new or innovative, these ideas are often buried or overlooked by the administrators of PPC campaigns. Consider these ideas in relation to your campaigns.
Clarify Your Goals
Just like any other marketing initiative and just like in life, setting clearly-defined goals is critical to success in pay per click advertising. So many businesses expand into the pay per click advertising marketing with poorly-defined goals, at best. They say, 'I want to drive more traffic to my website,' or 'I want people to know who my brand is.' The problem with this thinking is that, in the long run, they can't justify the expense well enough to stay in for the long haul.
The beauty of pay per click advertising is that the response and outcomes can be directly measured. Businesses with clearly defined goals can clearly measure the cost and value of each campaign, perhaps more clearly than any other channel.
Before beginning any campaign, define exactly what you want to get from it. Here are some examples of goals that advertisers in different industries may set:
eCommerce Website s - There is a world of potential in pay per click advertising for eCommerce advertisers. Typically, the clearly defined goal is ROI of advertising spend. eCommerce advertisers can define the required ROI that makes this advertising channel make sense for their business. For every dollar they spend, they need to see a return of 'X' dollars. Sometimes, this model relies on determining the lifetime value (LTV) of customers to meet ROI requirements. While they may not break even on the initial advertising spend, they may meet their return a few months down the road when the customer returns to purchase again. Tracking LTV is more complicated but is worth the effort,
Lead Generation - Whether you're a local business or a global software development firm, generating leads may be your main goal for pay per click advertising. Here, you can calculate the cost of acquiring each lead and compare it to the value of each lead and the cost of generating leads through other channels. The key points:
Does the value of each lead exceed the cost to attain that lead?
Are there cheaper opportunities for acquiring leads of equal or greater value?
Name Collection - For publishers who rely on name collection and building email lists, pay per click advertising can be used to encourage newsletter signups and subscriptions. Here again, the advertiser needs to determine the lifetime value of each name acquired and compare it to the cost of acquiring the name. If the initial costs are recouped over time, it makes sense to continue the campaign.
Target Keywords- Start Small
Plain and simple, it doesn't usually pay to go broad when selecting keywords phrases for your pay per click ads. Traditional marketers are driven to 'cover all bases' in the offline world and, when this logic is applied to PPC, the results are almost always marginal, at best. Focusing campaigns on targeted keyword phrases is the best thing a PPC marketer can cut down on clicks from bad prospects.
All too often you see ads, from both local and global companies, appear for search queries that are extremely un-targeted. This money could be spent on targeted keyword campaigns that will convert much better. If you want to take a shotgun approach to getting your message out there, consider television, radio or banner advertising channels. Pay per click advertising is designed to be a targeted channel and it's a crime to treat it any other way.
For the most part, the best converting keywords are longer, more descriptive keywords. For example, a hotel running a PPC campaign would more likely convert bookings from someone searching for book new your city hotels than someone searching for new york city.
With keyword selection, don't follow the mentality that says, 'someone searching for this term might be interested in my product.' Follow the mentality that says, 'someone searching for this term is searching for my product.' This may seem elementary but many advertisers, even those spending bug bucks, continually run ads on keywords either loosely related or too broad for their product.
Landing Pages- Keep it Simple, Stupid
To create the ultimate landing page, pretend you're dealing with schoolchildren. What I mean is pretend your audience has a short attention span and can easily be distracted by bright, shiny objects. You landing page should be geared to elicit one response, and that response is the goal you set for your campaign. If your goal was to get visitors to purchase a product, show them the product and give them an offer and call to action they can't refuse. If your goal was to acquire an email address for your newsletter, you're your visitor incentive and show a signup box on the page. Forget about fancy designs and long, wordy sales copy. When you give visitors too many choices, they will more likely choose none than choose any one.
Of course, there is no worse way to run a campaign than to have only one landing page. Using A/B or multivariate testing is made easy by most major ad networks. If you have sufficient coin to spend, consider testing landing page designs and messages against one another. You will sleep better at night knowing that you're trying every possible combination to make the most from your pay per click advertising spend.
Ad Copy- Don't Promise what You Can't, and Don't, Deliver
There is no such thing as the perfect pay per click ad. The most important thing to remember when writing ad copy for pay per click campaigns is not to promise what you don't deliver on the landing page. That is, don't talk about an offer or product in the ad that isn't the main focus of your landing page. Why? Because you're paying for each click. If you attract a visitor to click on your ad with an incredible offer, back it up on the landing page. If the user doesn't see what they expect on the landing page, the user will leave with your $0.75, $1.50, $5.00 or whatever that click just cost you.
In summary, a good strategy for making PPC advertising work for consists of setting clear goals, selecting targeted keywords to bid on, creating focused landing pages and writing ads that bring all the above into alignment. Since each element of the campaign has to work well with all the others, it's critical to pay attention to each. Carelessly executed PPC campaigns often lead companies to believe that PPC marketing can't work for their business model. Often times, a properly managed pay per click program would have done the trick.
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