I’ve been using PPC marketing and AdWords for years, and I still lose my shirt on some campaigns from time to time. It’s just part of the game and I make the most out of each failed campaign by tearing it apart afterward and learning where it (or I) went wrong. So, even when a campaign fails I still pull some learning experience out of it and see that as a minor success. At least when I learn from mistakes I know I won’t make them again.
Now, I want to offer some practical tips here on getting more out of your PPC efforts, but I want to make sure that I’m very clear about two things:
- this is NOT an all-inclusive guide to PPC marketing, that would require several books to provide
- these are things that work for me, but with all of the variables involved, from what you may be promoting to how you write your ad copy, I make no guarantees that these will benefit you. You should judge for yourself whether or not some of these tips seem logical for your own campaigns, and don’t blame me if they don’t work or cost you money later
Okay, with that preface out of the way, here’s some of my thoughts and tips on PPC marketing:
1) Decide whether you want to make conversions or get traffic. There are valid reasons for both. Obviously, if you’re selling something you want conversions, but sometimes you may be attempting to increase the brand awareness for your product(s), business or website. If branding is a major component of your campaign, then getting traffic to click your ads is vital.
However, if you’re using PPC primarily to increase immediate conversions then you don’t actually want to get the most clicks on your ads, but rather the most targeted clicks.
It’s important to decide up-front what your goal is because it will affect how you approach your PPC ad writing and targeting decisions.
For example, if you’re promoting an offer for free 30 day supply trials of some product where the customer just has to pay the shipping fee, then either of these two ad headlines could work:
- “30 Day Supply of BLANK - Free Today!”
- “30 Day Supply of BLANK - only pay s/h”
However, the two headlines will likely have very different results. The first headline would get more clicks (which you are paying for) but have a lower conversion rate when visitors reached the landing page and found out they had to pay the shipping fees.
While the second headline might attract less clicks, but those clicks would convert much higher because the headline itself pre-qualifies visitors by telling them up-front that there is a shipping fee attached to the offer. This means a much higher ROI for your paid clicks.
A lot of marketers, especially when new to PPC marketing, think that the more traffic their ads drive the better, but that isn’t always the case. If you’re not branding your products or site with your PPC campaign, then you should have the mentality that you’re “paying for sales” with PPC, not “paying for traffic”–and design your campaigns so that you only attract and pay for the most qualified visitors to your offer.
2) Invest in lots of landing pages. Whenever I start a new PPC campaign, I usually start out with a short list of keywords that I may expand upon later, but initially I won’t have more than about 30 keywords to target because I want to judge the quality of the keywords, traffic and my offer before expanding.
I then break my list of keywords down into groups of 3’s that fit together, and create a separate landing page for each group. So, if I have 30 keywords to start, then I will have 10 landing pages to start, with each landing page targeting 3 keywords from my list.
This helps with your quality score (I believe) so can lower your per-click costs with AdWords, but more importantly it makes a direct connection between the keyword that your visitor searched for and the offer/landing page you deliver to them, which can increase conversions.
And yes, as I grow my keyword list once I know an offer is performing well, I will also continue to add more landing pages as well.
3) Add some personality to your landing pages. For me personally, as a web browsing consumer there’s nothing worse than to click an ad and end up on a dry, stale product detail page. Long before I began using PPC to promote my own sites, I was simply a consumer online and I can tell you that I’ve never made a purchase after clicking an ad and landing on a product details page of an ecommerce site.
If you run or are promoting an ecommerce site (as I do), take the time to create unique landing pages for the products you’re going to promote through PPC and add some personality to them. Give visitors a compelling reason to read through your copy or continue with your offer.
To sum this up, decide if you want to pay for traffic or pay for sales, then tailor your ad copy to that mission. Remember that each visitor who clicks your ad is an opportunity for you to interact and impress someone with your product(s), services or business, so make the most of that opportunity and don’t serve up a boring sales page.
It may not seem like much, but these simple concepts are missed by a ton of people using PPC and I know they’re losing conversions and opportunities because of it.
Tags: adwords, ppc marketing