Pay Per Click advertising (aka PPC) is often a marketing tactic used while building organic search engine results. Many people believe that pay per click campaigns can be an integral aspect to your online marketing and they are right, however many people don’t fully understand how or even what to do with a pay per click campaign.
Let’s discuss the various aspects of pay per click advertising, utilizing Google’s AdWords, and how we can use pay per click to help our marketing efforts rather than just cost us excess money with no results.
Traffic vs. Conversions
When you first consider pay per click advertising, you need to understand its purpose. Many marketers and companies have mislead their customers into believing that the primary success metric is driving “traffic”. With pay per click this should not be your focus, in fact your focus should be on “conversions”. The reason many companies don’t approach pay per click from this approach is due to the fact that it is much harder to track.
Looking at conversions instead of traffic will guarantee a successful campaign and will generate a higher return on investment for your business.
So how do we get conversions? There are several things we can do to help increase our conversions and run successful pay per click campaign:
Landing Pages
The first thing you should consider is your landing page. We need to create a landing page that is optimized for conversions and promotes the product or topic for the ad we are running. Look at it this way, if our advertisement is for custom made cabinets but our landing page is promoting custom installed counter tops our conversions will be low (if any). Our landing page must be relevant and guide the user effectively to make a purchase or perform what ever task you need, such as signing up for a newsletter, contacting your company, etc.
Research shows that people who click on pay per click ads are ready to buy, they are conversion oriented. Guide users to make the purchase. Don’t send them to your website, instead a specifically designed landing page will ensure these conversions.
Ad Placement
Your ad placement is determined by how much you are willing to pay per click over your competitors. If the average cost per click or CPC is $3.00 and your competitors are paying $3.25, if you pay $4.00 per click you will achieve higher ad placement. The draw back on ad placement comes into play when your competitors have poorly optimized advertisements which will lead to an inflated cost per click for everyone. If you increase your quality score, you will be able to lower the impact of the inflated cost per click as a result of the poor campaigns.
Quality Scores
Quality Scores help your pay per click campaign based on the quality of your ads, the quality of your content and landing pages, the length of visitors staying on your landing page, and your conversion rates. Google will assign this quality score based on these factors which will ultimately lower your cost per click and increase your ad placement.
Return on Investment
When deciding on a pay per click campaign, you must determine your return on investment. Say you run a PPC campaign with a budget of $500 and it costs you $5.00 per click and you get an average conversion rate of about 10-15% (varies by industry) and your average product sells at $150.00. Based on these numbers your return on investment is worth it as you will gain about $1500 in total revenue. If you determine that the cost is higher than your return, then a PPC campaign may not be a good fit for your marketing campaign.
Conclusion
When you look at running any pay per click advertising campaign, you must determine first if this will generate the results you need and whether its worth your return. Calculate your monthly budget and focus on building a landing page and content that promotes conversions. It’s easy drive traffic, but if the traffic isn’t targeted, you are wasting money on driving people to your landing page that aren’t interested in what you have to offer.