Hate The Grind

When it comes to advertising on PPC networks such as Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing or Microsoft AdCenter, it is extremely important to continually monitor your campaigns to ensure you are getting the best value out of your advertising dollars. I decided to put together a quick list of things you can do to improve the chances your advertising campaign will succeed.

• Bid on the right keywords

Sure, sounds simple up front. Just bid on the good keywords, and don’t bid on the bad ones! Great. If only it was that easy… You may be surprised to hear that it really is not as difficult as you think. Internet Marketing Specialists will tell you its tough and that you require special tools to analyze the data but these consultants make their money by setting up campaigns for your company and they get paid very well because they make their job seem a lot harder than it really is. Most of them will just bid on every keyword that is under the sun and triple the amount of traffic going to your website. Unfortunately, the only person making money will be your internet provider as your bandwidth costs skyrocket. Choose keywords that relate to your site. Keep track of which keywords result in no sales and remove them from your campaigns. Not only will you spend less on keywords that don’t convert, you’ll also spend less on your related keywords as your Quality Score will improve. Having lots of poorly performing keywords affects your entire Ad group on Google, so ditching them is your best bet.

• Bid within your budget

Keeping your bids within budget is extremely important. If you exceed your budget, you may not be able to profit off of the traffic that will result from your over zealous bidding. You do not need to be the first sponsored result to be successful. In fact, I find ranking 2nd to 3rd is far better than being in the 1st position for most keywords. People who are searching on search engines will normally revisit the search results to see more information on what they searched on.

• Improve Your Ads

If cost is not the issue, and you just want more traffic to your website then you should take a look at your ad copies. Sometimes changing one or two words can have dramatic effects on the performance of your ads. Your ad should always have a call to action to encourage the user to do something such as “Try our demo today”, “Visit us Today”, or “Sign Up for Free”. All of these is asking the user do something. Also, consider inserting the user’s search query into your ad copy. It will instantly capture their attention, and if used correctly will have a huge impact on click through rates. As with all optimization, the key is to keep trying new things. Keep track of all your changes and give it time to see results.

• Landing Page Design

You’ve already paid for the click. The user is now on your website to see what you have to offer. The key to a successful landing page is continuity. If your ad invites users to sign-up for something, then they will expect to find a sign-up form after they click on the ad. Don’t bait and switch, this will frustrate your visitors and they will leave. Keep your landing page simple and to the point, don’t overwhelm them with information. I found that reducing the number of outbound links from the landing page worked well, but don’t funnel your users too much. If you only offer one option, and the user is not interested, they will leave and look for something else. I found that anywhere from 2 - 4 links on my landing pages works the best.

• Reduce Impact of Fraud

This is especially important if you advertise on the content networks in your PPC campaigns. There are many websites out there that are built strictly for serving ads. They are referred to as MFA (Made For AdSense) websites, or Ad Farms as that is essentially what they are. While some of these sites do result in quality traffic that converts into sales, the overwhelming majority of these websites just eat away at your advertising dollars. My rep over at Google sends me weekly reports on my content network campaigns which lists the websites that are serving my ads along with the usual metrics. Using these reports as well as data from my own tracking system I can quickly eliminate sites that have not sent any quality traffic and as a result, more of my money goes towards those sites that do result in sales.

Other posts you may be interested in:

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