Pay Per Click Advertising Optimisation Tips23 Oct
Now while I don’t carry out much PPC work for clients, I do use it to promote my own businesses and products. One thing I do see with lots of enquiries is that companies use PPC but contact me because it is not as successful as they thought it could be.
So I thought I would drop down a few ideas to help boost the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns.
- Take time building a keyword list. It is easy to go to Google Adwords and setup a campaign in 5 minutes flat. But if you do not research your keywords properly, you could be leaving a ton of money on the table or you could be keeping your average costs per click rates high. Use services such as Wordtracker or the Google Keyword Tool, look at your competitors websites, and look at your own web server logs to see what people are typing in to find you.
- Build dedicated landing pages. This is a shocker! Lots of companies build multiple PPC campaigns and drive the traffic to either their homepage or a product page. This can cause the user great confusion as they are presented with a ton of options when then hit your site and they may not even find what they were looking for. On this basis you are paying for people to get lost on your site!
My advice is to build dedicated keyword landing pages or at the very least a landing page for each campaign you run. Each landing page should do one of two things only. Get an email address or contact details; or to make a sale in the case of an e-commerce site. That’s it! Strip out the main site navigation, remove the phone numbers (How will you track the true effectiveness of the campaign?) And make it easy for the visitor to do what you want.
- Time schedule your ads. If you are collecting a filled in form to get back to the customer the same day, why have your ads running when your office is closed. That just wastes everyone’s time and your money.
- Look to add negative keywords. They are words that you can add to make sure you do not appear for. This could be something that would appear in combination with your own keywords. The big ones are words like “free” or “guaranteed” or even brand names.
Hopefully these ideas will give you enough to start really using PPC more effectively and save yourself some money.
