Pay-Per-Click advertising is a very effective way of marketing your products or services. It can also be very tricky requiring a lot of “hands on” management and strategic planning. Over the last 6 years I have learned many techniques to help customers get the maximum ‘bang for their buck’. Below are a few tips to help you get the most out of your Pay-Per-Click campaigns.
For those unfamiliar with Pay-Per-Click, it is an Internet Marketing strategy used to direct traffic to websites. Advertisers pay the publisher (typically a website owner) when their ad is clicked, directing traffic to a given website. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on relevant phrases used by their target market. Here is the tricky part where due diligence comes in: one can spend a lot of money very quickly and have very few conversions to show for it.
All of your Pay-Per-Click campaigns will contain ads searchers will click on to be directed to your website. The ads are crucial to the success of your campaign. These ads comprise a headline, description, display URL and a destination URL. Use your keywords in your headline or description. Ideally, make your destination URL very targeted to the keywords. Avoid directing searchers to your home page. Research the best place within your website. This will help improve relevancy and a page’s quality score while often decreasing your overall cost.
Multiple keywords mean multiple ads. Do some ad testing to pin point what customers in your industry are looking for in ads and how to better market yourself to them. Changing as little as one word can often make an impact on your CTR (click through ratio). Most search engines allow you to run more than one ad and change the settings to determine which ads are converting better.
Keywords and managing their bids is also a crucial part of a successful Pay-Per-Click campaigns. Studies have shown that placement in the top three (3) positions have a much higher CTR than ads in lower positions. If your keyword is highly competitive however, this may be difficult to achieve. How much you have your max CPC (cost per click) set for is a major factor in where the search engines place your ads. Some very general words such as “books” can have a lot of competitors bidding on it and cost several dollars per click in order to be in those top positions. Using more specific and long tail keywords such as “college text books” can result in more targeted traffic and a lower CPC. Using these more specific keywords can result in a lower cost per conversion and help with your company’s ROI.
Pay-Per-Click advertising can be very profitable for your company. Know that there are many strategies to keep your cost down while getting the most conversions from your investment. Using these techniques can help you increase the overall performance of your Pay-Per-Click campaigns and, most important, boost your conversion rate.
For more information on Pay-Per-Click advertising, call us at 1-800-978-3417 or Contact Active Web Group and let us help you!
