How to Optimize your
Pay Per Click Campaigns

Learn to Optimize your PPC Campaigns

The benefits of Pay Per Click (PPC) Google AdWords compared with established techniques is just this: almost all established methods are broadcast methods to potential customers who have shown little interest in purchasing your service. Think of radio ads, flyers through doors, bill board posters etc etc. They are all broadcast adverts. Sure some are more directed than others, if you are selling marketing services to firms, you advertise in a Marketing magazine, but that's a crude technique these days.

Search Yahoo for "cars" and down the right hand side, you'll see advertisements by websites who are paying them to have their advert and site displayed there on the main page of the results. This is PPC Advertising and this is why Google is a multi billion dollar firm!

How about someone searching Yahoo for "how to do online marketing for solicitors"? That's a potential customer that right at that moment in time is interested in learning a very specific thing. If you expect to sell a service that can help , you'd better hope that you're on the first page of Yahoo or any search engine. What's the value to you to have that potential customer visit your website within 3 seconds of typing that into Yahoo search?

You could search engine optimize your website to make sure you have top rankings for your term, but this takes time and effort and a reasonable investment of money. This is where paid internet marketing really starts to shine, and is not used enough I think. Your website could be on the first page of your chosen Search Engine the same day for your search term for a very small budget. In a few days you'd have some idea of the quantity of potential customers that will positively look for that term, visit your website, and buy your service. This is up to date, market research for a bargain budget that is impossible to get any other way.

Lets say that you are paying 20c per click, and 500 people click your ad making a combined total spend of $100. Lets say the conversion rate is a reasonable one percent, so you've got 5 new sales and more importantly five additional customers that you can now up sell to. All for $100 spent! How much is your typical consumer worth in total? It's attractive isn't it?

One key thing to understand is how Google ranks the sponsored PPC marketing Adverts. In essence it's a real time auction. The highest bidder comes out on top. If you bid 20c and a competitor bids 25c, they will rank higher than your bid. Actually it's significantly more involved than that: if you have a top quality PPC ad campaign, it's possible for you to rank above the 25c ad because Google will give bonuses to higher performing PPC ads.

The point is that if your internet marketing expert knows what (s)he's doing with PPC bid management, it's likely you will achieve improved rankings (i.e. more traffic) for less cash. So your limited online website promotion budget goes further and you save budget. Equally, if your online advertising campaign is administered by someone who doesn't know their job, it will cost you more.

Here are some of the tasks a specialist Google Advertising Professional should perform whilst managing your account. If yours isn't done this way, we strongly advise you get a PPC review of your online marketing campaign as soon as possible:

Bid for First Page or Don't Bother - The key factor of PPC advertising campaigns is to get on the first page of your Yahoo, MSN, search engine etc quickly. However, where there is in excess of eight (in normal conditions) even PPC Adverts can drop to the 2nd page. Where there is competition like this, there is absolutely little point doing a PPC marketing campaign if you are not on the 1st page, so either boost your Cost Per Click (CPC) values, or forget it.

Tracking for Better Website ROI - This is high technology marketing, this is not usual marketing, so you can use that to your gain. The technology exists to track each and every sale and from where it comes. You can learn definitely which ad converts to sales and which do not. It's one thing to have significant people visiting your website, it's another to have lots of sales. What would you prefer to have for PPC paid advertising an ad that generates a thousand clicks and one percent sales, or one that generates one hundred leads but ten% sales? In each you gain identical sales, but the 1st costs you 10x as much in PPC advertising budget.

Landing Page Matching - A very common mistake is not matching the page that users see when they click your ad, to the content of your ad; which definitely should be aimed at what the consumer searched for. This simply means that when the consumer clicks your Ad, they get to see what they want to. Did you know that internet users are lazy? Would you believe that half of all internet searchers leave a website in under eight seconds because they don't find what they expected!

Split Testing your Ads - This is good PPC technique and simply means having more than one ad and testing which one works best. Here is one example, we had 2 ads which were the same in every way except the beginning of the top title. One began "Learn to Prevent..." and the other began with "Stop...". Split testing found that 5% of the users who saw the "Learn to Prevent...." clicked it. BUT 8 percent of the users who saw the "Stop..." advert clicked that one. It won't surprise you to learn that, we abandoned the first advert and got a better quality Ad which eventually Google promoted to the top advertising slot on the page, for the same Price Per Click!

Several Ad Groups - The basic rookie mistake is to group all your keywords together to feed a single Ad. This is typically bad. Keywords should be divided into groups with Ad text that accurately shows the keywords searched for.

Exact Matching / Broad / Phrase - Google PPC Advertising allows 3 different ways of matching search terms to your keywords, but many online marketers just go for the default matching option. You could double your Click Through Rate from intelligent use of the other options which many incompetent Google Advertising Professionals do not even bother with.