Want to be on the top of Google tonight? If so, then PPC is your answer.
Pay Per Click (PPC)
Link to what you’re selling
Seems like a pretty simple concept but marketers get so wrapped up in bid amounts, keywords and ad text that they often overlook the most important aspect of Pay Per Click Marketing which is conversions. Do not send the potential consumer to your homepage. Build, or have a web designer build, landing pages for your campaign. Landing pages are campaign specific pages designed to give the user what they’re searching for and a couple different options about how they can get it. For example, if you’re searching for a specific shoe would you want to land on foot lockers home page or the page where you can see the shoes you were looking for and choose your size/color, checkout and call it a day? This is the most common flaw in PPC campaigns and WILL cost you a lot of money for little or no business.
Pay Per Click campaigns on multiple search engines?
It’s no secret that Google is the dominant force in the search advertising realm but Yahoo and Bing still get millions of searches every month. Google seems like the obvious answer when it comes to trying out PPC marketing but what if the exact same ads are cheaper on the other search engines? This may or may not be the case but Pay Per Click marketing is all about trial and error. Test and re-test, figure out what works and dump what doesn’t. On moderate PPC monthly budgets, you’re not going to have enough money to be at the top of the search engines every hour of every day so why not make your money go farther. Even on the less popular search engines like Yahoo and Bing, there is a very good chance that enough people are searching for your goods/service every month to empty your wallet so why not see who will give the best return on investment?
PPC image ads, are they worth it?
Yes. The biggest downside of image ads is the effect they have on your CTR or click through ratio. You may be asking, well if I’m getting enough clicks then why does a poor click through ratio (CTR) even matter? It matters when it comes to your “Google Quality Score” which I’ll elaborate more on in the next section. The main reason image ads provide a much lower CTR is because consumers are not usually searching for your product/service when they see your image ads but instead just happen to be on a page that is relevant to what you’re selling while text ads are driven towards buyers looking for your product/service. That of course is a downside but I strongly believe properly designed image ads are great additions to PPC campaigns because you’re bidding against a smaller group of marketers which in turn makes the bid amounts lower and you have the opportunity to get a better return on investment.
Google Adwords and Quality Score
The Google Quality Score is Google’s grading system for your Adwords keywords based on your ad campaign. Do not rack your brain and continuously redesign your page, keyword stuff titles and page content to try and up this score. Google established their quality score to slow down advertisers from advertising irrelevant content. Their way of slowing them down is by raising cost if the page isn’t relevant to the search. On the flip-side you get rewarded with lower costs if you build quality landing pages but it doesn’t stop there. You also need to “pay your dues” if you will in the form of establishing a quality “CTR” or click-through-rate which plays the most significant factor. What CTR means is the percentage of times your ad is clicked versus the number of times it is seen which are called impressions. Having a high click-through-rate plays a major role in your quality score which lowers cost significantly. Balance targeted landing pages with keyword-rich, targeted ad copy and the quality score will take care of itself. Have some more questions about Adwords or just Pay Per Click Marketing in general? Click the button below and we’ll talk.
