Article of
the week; Not getting the return you expected from your Pay-per-click
marketing campaign?
Many companies are finding that via higher costs, greater
competition and lack of focus the budget allocated for PPC
is not achieving the expected results. The service is marketed
as being straightforward but the reality is that PPC involves
far more time & knowledge than most businesses are able
to direct towards it. This causes businesses to cut their
losses and allocate resources elsewhere, leaving the opportunity
and the sales for their competitors.
I have found that PPC requires optimising just as much as
a Natural search campaign here are a few things you can do;
A) Keyword strategy
a. make sure you research your keywords, go to Google,
Overture
and Wordtracker.com
b. look at your competitors
c. divide your keywords into groups & sub groups
B) Monitor Keyword performance
a. Make sure you know which keywords give you the best return.
If you have 500 keys active which ones are converting? The
80/20 rule applies here in that a certain number of keys will
achieve results whilst others will not
C) Use Negative keys & understand Pattern Matching
a. If you are bidding on the word ‘asbestos’ but
you only do roof repairs, then words like disease, cure, symptoms
should be excluded
b. Adwords pattern matching is very powerful, if you only
sell acoustic guitars then “acoustic guitars”
will get words in that order , but not “acoustic metal
guitars”, [acoustic guitars] will match the phrase exactly.
Are your broad match keys getting results or your exact matches?
Review your web stats data also for keywords.
D) Bidding Strategy
a. Position 1 is for big ego’s and budgets. There is
a lot of research on this one, with data like "people
who click on the 1st listing are not ready to buy". Perhaps
position 5 will work best for your business, how will you
know if you do not monitor? What is the best CPA for your
business when do you stop making money? What is the value
of the campaign to your business in terms of people picking
up the phone instead, after seeing an ad online?
b. Are you aware that recently Overture’s top partners,
MSN and Yahoo, now show up to eight “sponsor results”
or paid ads on the first page? In some cases, the fourth and
fifth or fifth and sixth positions will show at the bottom
of the first results page and again at the top, right margin
of the first results page – in essence two ads for the
price of one.
E) How good are your ads?
a. Are you rotating your ads in Adwords to see which ad has
highest click through? Never stop testing and trying new ads.
b. Qualify your leads in the ads if you can, say your product
costs something for example, that will get rid of the freebie
hunters.
c. Write a great title followed by benefits (line 2) and then
features (line 3)
F) Landing pages, where do you send your traffic?
a. If you are selling tours to the ‘silk road’
don’t send traffic to your home page which talks about
trips all over the world. Send the users to a page selling
the ‘silk road’ tour!
b. Rotate landing pages test, test, test
So the moral to the story is it takes time, knowledge and
effort to get a good return from PPC.
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