Get The Most Out Of Pay-Per-Click Investment

Most marketers on the Internet use PPC (pay-per-click) at some point within their broader marketing mix.  Sometimes they use it so successfully that they make enough in resulting sales to cover the cost of the advertising campaign.  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.  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, although you should feel free to make a profit at the same time  (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.  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.  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.  You can work on your SEO for those pages in order to get organic search engine traffic to those new pages.  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 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.  Alternatively, you might want to test the impact of landing pages which have two different videos of product demonstrations.

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 article 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 funds that you are spending as you can.  Test, analyze and use the data!