How can you achieve success in Pay Per Click?
0. Get your website ready.
Make sure your website is ready to accept leads and has pages set up that contain good content about everything you do. I know this isn’t about pay per click marketing specifically, but you’re not ready for pay per click marketing if you aren’t ready to put your best foot forward and truly inform a visitor about why you are the best choice for them on a particular subject matter. And then your website must make it easy to become a lead.
Oftentimes, I am brought in when conversions are just not happening. I am then asked to review a marketing account for problems that is for the most part set up fine; it is the website itself that does not do what it needs to to turn a prospect into a customer. And that is far more expensive in the end than throwing money at pay-per-click. If it never converts a pay per click visitor, it’s not going to convert a less motivated visitor either.
1. Start with what you already know.
Your Analytics data contains a treasure trove of what keywords people used when the actually clicked through onto your site. Go into Analytics, look at this data carefully. You may be surprised to discover a whole pack of keywords that you know already work. While you’re here, bring your expectations with you – look around. Are you seeing the keywords in that list that you think you should be receiving traffic on? If not, get a page added to your site or optimized around that term. You’ll need it.
You also already know something about your existing customers. However you’ve documented that, take a look. Keywords will pop out. If not, certainly some selling points will.
2. Keywords are key.
Start with the two lists you’ve already got – the keywords that bring traffic to your site already, and the keywords you feel you are best for based on your gut. First use a tool like SpyFu to find out what your closest known competitors are bidding on. Then take those three lists, and use a keyword expansion tool to expand those keywords out. Then review the full list for themes and break them up into ad groups by relationship to one another. If you sell shoes, then pumps, sandals, flats, and boots all need their own ad groups, as do brand names like Nike, Frye, Manolo Blahniks, UGG, etc. As do actions such as buy, price, size and find.
Don’t combine subject matters in an ad group.
3. Ads need to be about the search.
Once they’re broken out into ad groups, take a look at your ads. If you can’t answer “yes!” to every one of the below questions, you need to rethink the ad.
Does the ad address the keywords it is applied to specifically? Are you using keyword insertion? Are you directing that ad to a very specific page on your website that answers that searcher’s need? Are you, in the keyword, the ad and finally the landing page, addressing the exact issue that drove the person to search for that item and that issue only?
The closer your campaign gets to being able to say “Yes!” to that final question, the better your campaign is likely to convert.
Search for your keyword yourself, see what ads come up. How can you make your ad better than those ads? What can you offer that will make your ad the obvious choice? Are you setting yourself apart from competing ads in your ad text? If you’re not setting yourself apart, you will not be chosen.
4. Your know-how should be part of your ads.
You’ll need to write at least 3 ad variations to show for each group of keywords for best results.
I find that a lot of clients simply make up the text for their ads at the moment they are confronted with creating the ad, rather than utilizing customer survey data, marketing research, or competition analysis. While this may seem to be an odd practice, it is quite prevalent. The immediate nature of the web means that you often are given the ability to do things quickly, with little thought. However, you ought to apply some of your existing market know-how to your ads. I doubt you’d start a billboard ad campaign without thinking out a marketing strategy. Pay per click marketing also should be entered into with a marketing strategy. What do you know are your customers “buttons”? What do you know you need to say to close a sale? What has previous experience taught you about your customers?
Another common mistake is routing all the traffic from an ad to the website’s home page – forcing another click (or two or three…) in order to reach the page that actually addresses the customer’s need.
Expecting an outside consultant to come up with all your ad text for you, without first providing every piece of information about your business, specials, product lines, services offered, is cutting off a portion of your potential business. As a consultant, I CAN do it – I often do – and I do it by immersing myself in your company long enough to understand what to say. But no one knows better than the guy on the ground what’s happening. And you need to keep that in mind when hiring a marketing firm. Give them the information they need to make compelling advertising for you.
How are you competitive? What are your existing successful marketing campaigns saying? Is there any branding occurring that should be integrated into the pay per click campaigns? Pass that along to whomever you’ve hired to build out your pay-per-click marketing campaigns. It will pay off in dividends later.
5. Continue to learn and apply what you learn.
Once you have an active pay per click campaign, you’re suddenly privy to wondrous jewels of market information — prospect interests you’re not currently addressing, markets that don’t sell, markets that nearly always buy, the paths your prospects take through your site, etc. All of this is available if you set up your marketing campaigns to pass along information to Analytics. I recommend setting this up early, and getting daily reports. By paying attention to the information that you receive from your Analytics you will find out ways that your site needs improvement, that your ad campaigns can be fine-tuned to better convert, and new marketing avenues to consider. You could end up making more customers from a campaign you’d never conceived of originally than you do even from your original market.