Get the Most Out of Your Pay-Per-Click Dollar
Most marketers on the web use PPC (pay-per-click) at some point within their marketing mix. Much of the time these businesses hope that the increase in revenue will be at least enough to cover the advertising expenses andeven create additional profit. Some other businesses use these advertising campaigns with the primary objective of building their list of leads so that they may gradually build a relationship with the prospects that will eventually create some of them into customers. Other marketers focus their PPC campaigns upon gathering research and planning data that will reap benefits for years to come. Of course, none of these objectives need exclude the other possibilities.
I am writing this article to draw your attention to using pay-per-click as a research tool (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. If you set up your advertising campaign so that each ad group (group of related keywords) delivers traffic to a separate landing page, you will know only what words have been included in the users search phrase, but you won’t know the exact phrase (unless you use only exact match keywords). 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. Any traffic you receive would be looking to buy some sort of green lamp. You probably do not sell all of those that your visitors want. You may want to create pages for the key phrases that are applicable (and which seem to be giving you enough traffic to justify the relatively minimal effort). You can work on your SEO for those pages in order to get organic search engine traffic to those new pages. This effectively allows you to spread the cost of your pay-per-click campaign across many years.
* Create a couple landing pages at a time, in which only the headlines or headings differ. You might have a content management system or software that can alternate those. If not, allow a number of clicks (maybe 100) to land on one version, then manually change the landing page to the other version. Compare the conversion results from the two versions. If there is a clear winner, keep it in the rotation and set up another test with a different alteration in the heading.
* Next, use the same test format as with the heading tests to vary a totally different content variable. For example, you may want to test two different product images against each other. Alternatively, you might want to test the impact of landing pages which have two different videos of product demonstrations.
Make sure that on each of the content related tests you are only changing one variable. If you alter both the image and the headline at the same time, for example, you will have difficulty determining which variable is responsible for any changes in the results or what the relative impact of each is compared to the other. Of course, if you have experience with multi-variant analysis, you may choose to alter more than one variable at any given time. Most people, however, do not have that level of statistical sophistication.,
The major point to take away from this is that you should be using your PPC campaigns to do more than bring visitors to your site and hope that they will buy something. PPC can be very costly, so stretch those dollars to accomplish as much as possible. Test, analyze and use the data that you wisely collect!
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