You're spending money every month on PPC, but are you optimising your Returns?

PPC (Pay Per Click) is one of the mainstays of any good Internet Marketing strategy.  It is a highly effective method of bringing qualified visitors to your online business.  A well-managed PPC campaign can deliver very attractive Returns on Investment, but a critical part of the equation is sending your visitor to the correct Landing Page.

Here are 5 tips for optimising your landing page:

1. Don't send them to your homepage

Your visitor has already performed their search and has clicked on your advert in favour of all the others, so why then give them a hard time by making them navigate around your website?  A targeted advert should send your visitor to an targeted landing page, i.e. one that precisely matches what they searched for.  Get this wrong and you'll lose them straight away.

2. Know what your goal is

You brought the visitor to your landing page for a reason.  So be specific when they arrive there.  You can't have it all ways.  You might want them to buy now, to call you, or to give you their email address.  Don't be greedy, your landing page should be a "take it or leave it" page.

3. Call to Action

Once you've decided on that goal, make it EASY and QUICK for them to do it.  Few words, simple layout, clear unambiguous language.

You've spent hours creating your ad campaign, selecting the keywords and designing a great looking landing page, and everything looks great.  But that's just your opinion.  You need to test and adjust.  The tiniest of changes can have a significant impact on click through rate, bounce rate or conversion rate.  Test for things such as placement of your phone number, colours, layout.  Particularly for larger budgets, spend some time working through the tests in a scientific way and arrive at an optimised campaign.

5. Be Consistent

Your role is to provide a consistent experience through your particular sales funnel.  Think about it - they typed in a Google search, they were presented with a list of results, they clicked on you, and by now they've built up a certain expectation.  Deliver against this expectation by using consistent language, from the search terms to the advert content to the landing page.

This is the How To guide on Paid Advertising (PPC, or Pay Per Click).

Welcome to the 3rd and final article in the series.

The first article gave us a very brief introduction to the subject, explaining why Paid Advertising (or PPC) is one of the cornerstones of Internet Marketing and a sure-fire way of getting your business straight on to the pages of Google’s search results.

The second article took a deeper look at the importance of keywords in the creation of your ad.

This third and final article discusses Return on Investment and more specifically how to measure it.  For any business looking to invest its money on advertising, it will want to know the likely returns it can expect, and calculating this from many of the traditional forms of media advertising has been imprecise at best and impossible at worst.

Internet marketing is different.  The Paid Advertising model allows every click and transaction to be measured and reported.  The advertiser is able to know exactly:

-   where the budget was spent

-   how many people saw the ad (and therefore “cost per impression”)

-   how many people clicked on the ad (and therefore “cost per click”)

(and if the target website is appropriately designed, it is also then possible to measure a whole host of further metrics including what each visitor did on the site, how long they stayed, how many pages they looked at, how much they spent, the average revenue per click, and more)

This type of data is simply not available from traditional media (print, TV, radio).  The data allows a number of calculations to be made that can be used as primary metrics to drive the business plan and marketing strategy.  Or in simple terms the numbers may just be used to convince the advertiser that it’s been a worthwhile use of the marketing budget. (That’s usually the first thing we’d want to know!)

There are many ways of calculating an ROI (Return on Investment).  Here’s a simple one for the Paid Advertising model:

                         ROI   =   Contribution  /  Cost

Se we just need to know 2 things:  Contribution and Cost

                                     The Contribution is calculated by:

                                             Contribution  =  [ average profit per sale x number of sales ]  –  PPC spend

                                      And Cost is just the cost of the PPC spend (i.e. the monthly ad budget)

So here’s an example using real numbers:

                          Monthly PPC spend:               £1000

                          Average profit per sale:           £100

                          Number of sales per month:    30

           So Contribution   =   £100 x 30 – 1000  =  £2000

           And ROI                  =   £2000  /  £1000     =  £200%

Remember, for this model to work, you need to be able to identify the sales that came as a result of the PPC ad, versus those that came from other sources (i.e. people that found your website through an “organic” search, or repeat visitors just typing in the URL or using their bookmark.)  This is easy if the analytics code is installed on your site and you know how to interpret the data.

So that’s really all there is to it.  If your ROI is greater than 100%, you’ve made a profit from your investment.  And if it’s greater than about 103%, you’ve done better than just putting your money in the bank!

For any further questions on how to run a PPC campaign, or Internet Marketing in general, don’t hesitate to give WSI a call at 01772 286460.

This is the "How To" guide on Paid Advertising (PPC, or Pay Per Click).

Welcome to the 2nd in the series.

The first article gave us a very brief introduction to the subject.  Paid Advertising (or PPC) is one of the cornerstones of Internet Marketing, and without doubt one the quickest and most straightforward ways of getting your business straight on to the pages of Google’s search results.

For many businesses trying to outdo their online competition, Page 1 of Google is the stuff of legend; cloaked in mystery and carrying an almost mythical status.  Certainly, achieving Page 1 “naturally” is a long-term undertaking, requiring skill and patience and, for businesses in highly competitive areas (“cheap digital cameras”, “cheapest flights to New York”), it also requires a sustained and professionally-executed business strategy.

Paid Advertising is the way to remove the time/patience factor and jump straight in to the oncoming path of the people who are searching for what you’re selling.  And therein lies the beauty of PPC.  But how do you write the most effective ad campaigns?  Well, read on.

Keyword Research

For PPC campaigns, it begins and ends with keyword research.  Selecting the right keywords is critical.  Getting it right is the road to sales nirvana.  Getting wrong is the road to, well, nobody clicking through to your website.  (Although I suppose the upside here is that you won’t be paying very much to Google - with PPC you only pay if somebody actually clicks on your ads)...

You need to have a strategy for picking the most relevant words - think of this as your “core list” - perhaps 10 or so words that immediately spring to mind when thinking of your particular product or service.  From there, the list needs to fan out to cover the less obvious words, the longer (multi-word) phrases, and even the common spelling mistakes of your keywords.  At this point, developing a PPC ad can sound very similar to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), and so it should, because Google always works on the basis of relevance.  i.e. how close your words and phrases match those of the search query.

Common advice here is to get other people to contribute to the keyword list.  Involve your business colleagues, the marketing department, even your friends and family.  You need to make sure the list of keywords is comprehensive, representative, and accurate.

Talking of marketing departments, a cautionary note:  your customers and prospects do not always describe your products & services in the same way that you do.  An obvious example (for British readers) might be vacuum cleaners.  When yours blows up and you search online for a new one, aren’t you more likely to search for a hoover?  This brings us to the interesting world of trademarks, copyright and patent law.  Whilst advertisers are bound by such laws dictating the way they can protect, brand and market their goods, the people searching for them are not.  If your PPC campaign (and your website and SEO campaign for that matter) are not matched to how people are “Googling” your products, you may quickly find yourself invisible.

An often quoted example from the travel industry is “cheap flights”.  This is a consumer term.  The travel industry describes them as “low-cost fares”.  If you are a travel agent and you build a PPC campaign around low-cost fares, you may be missing a big chunk of the potential traffic to your site.  Simple things make a big difference.

Creating the Advert

Google limits the ad to a specific number of lines and characters.  There are certain dos and don’ts, and certain etiquette to follow.  The skill at this stage is compressing everything you want to say into that limited space.  You must find a way to make the ad compelling and entice people in.  One notable feature of PPC is the ability to modify the ad in almost “real time”, so if it isn’t working, change it.  Another feature is the ability to run multiple ads and cycle through them to determine which is most effective at drawing visitors in.  At every step of the way, you can review everything in clear detail, down to the number of times the ad was displayed, how many people clicked on it, and what the Click Through Rate (CTR) was.  The objective here is to strive for an ever higher CTR.

Pricing

PPC allows each advertiser to dictate their own terms.  Firstly, the advertiser determines how much they are prepared to spend (per month, usually).  Once this upper limit is set, Google will keep to (and never exceed) that limit.  So no nasty surprises.  But of course the objective is to get as many clicks as possible from your budget, so you need to define the maximum you’re willing to spend for each click.  If you set it too low, you’ll be out-bid by competitors and risk not appearing in good positions, so you need to understand how competitive the pricing is for your set of keywords.  The whole process works like an auction.  Think ebay and you won’t be far wrong.

The limitations of PPC

Let’s be clear what PPC is (or isn’t).  It is not a way of increasing your sales.  It is not a way of making your phone ring.  It is not a way of increasing your customer base.

Does that sound strange?

Well, possibly, but PPC is nothing more than a way of driving “targeted” traffic to your website.  PPC in itself doesn’t make people buy, or do any of the other things you’d like them to do.   That’s what your website is for.  Your PPC ad may be compelling and well written, but then it’s over to your website to persuade its visitors to do something, to respond to a “call to action”, and this moves us on to a different subject - one called “conversion”.  A PPC ad campaign must be executed in conjunction with a compelling website, and a compelling website is one that moves people to buy/email/call/sign-up, etc.  We call it Conversion Architecture, and it brings together the disciplines of web design, graphic design, content creation, copywriting, sales psychology, human behaviour and eye tracking research.  If your website isn’t built on those principles, you should consider whether spending a lot on PPC is a good investment.

Does PPC actually work?

In a nutshell, yes.

        It gets your adverts displayed in prominent positions in the search results.

        It appears down the right-hand side (or across the top) of the search results.

        It appears when people do Google searches for the specific words you’ve put on your keywords list.

        It therefore drives targeted traffic to your website.

PPC works well as part of a broader, joined-up Internet Marketing strategy.  If your PPC campaign gets visitors to your website, and your website is designed with conversion in mind, then you have an excellent opportunity to convert more customers to your business.  PPC is very immediate (campaigns can go live within days), and is flexible (campaigns can be stopped, re-started, or edited at will).

PPC is a very safe way of entering the world of Internet Marketing.  Your budget is fixed and you can measure results in great detail.  If things go well, you can just scale up the budget and scale up the benefits.

How to measure Return on Investment is the subject of the next post, so keep watching...

Welcome to a series of "How To" guides on the subject of Paid Advertising (or PPC – Pay Per Click).

Since this is the first in the series, let’s keep it simple for now.

       Paid Advertising

           Paid Search Marketing

               Pay Per Click

                   PPC

                       Google Adwords

Cutting through the jargon, they're all describing exactly the same thing.  Most people probably don't know (but often wonder), how Google makes it millions, but there's no big secret.  A huge chunk of the Google fortune comes from PPC, and PPC is the mechanism by which advertisers (i.e. your company, my company), can pay Google to get on page 1.

(There is another way of getting to the top of the search results, for "free", but that's called Search Engine Optimisation, and a different subject altogether.

In a nutshell, the more money you give to Google, the more prominent your ad will display.

(Actually, as anybody experienced in Internet Marketing will quite rightly tell you, good things can come from small budgets, so PPC is far more about how clued up you are, not how deep your pockets are.  But more of that in later posts.)

The PPC model is clever, to say the least.  Being expert at it is part science, part psychology, and the beauty is your ads only get shown to a very specific audience.  If you really know what you’re doing you can almost hand select your visitors, which means you can filter out the tyre-kickers and only spend your budget on those who are genuinely interested.  It’s like having a doorman at the front of your shop quizzing people on how likely they are to buy from you... and stopping them coming in if they aren’t!

PPC is all about laying the bait, so yes, you need to know how to lure them in with enticing adverts, but most important of all is understanding how your potential visitors are describing your products and services (i.e. what are they typing into Google).  If the two of you disagree, then you’re always wrong, and you won’t get the business.  Sad, but true.

So, that's probably enough for now.  We’ve had a very brief introduction to the world of Paid Advertising, and we can put it to bed until next time when we’ll be looking at:

•   how to “hand-pick” your visitors

•   the importance of keyword research, and crucially,

•   matching what you’re selling to what people are searching for