4 Ways To Drive PPC Conversions

While all marketing is designed to sell products or services, some forms of marketing are expected to get more direct results than others. For example, the investment a company makes in pay per click marketing is considered successful when the conversion rate is high. The conversion rate is the percentage of clicks that turn into sales, and the number needs to be high if a PPC campaign is going to be considered successful.

There is plenty of talk about how to improve PPC campaigns to make them more effective, but what clients really want is information on how to increase their conversion rate and get more sales out of their efforts. Increasing your conversion rate occurs when you improve your campaign, but there are other things you can do to increase conversions when you are using a PPC marketing approach.

Be Mindful Of How Your PPC Affects Other Marketing Programs

There are metrics you can use to see how changes in your PPC program not only affect your return on that investment, but also on how they affect other marketing approaches you are using. Does your PPC changes increase the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign? It is important to keep an eye on the dynamics between all of your marketing programs if you want to get the most out of them.

Are You Thinking For The Future?

Is your PPC campaign designed to appeal to the customers you have now and the new customer segments you want to attract? While good marketing is only done at an identified target audience, you can expand your marketing influence by including keywords in your PPC campaign that start to draw in audiences that you plan on targeting in the future. This is how you lay the foundation for future marketing success, and how you can use your PPC keywords to grab the attention of people who don’t yet realize that they need or want your products.

Are You Relying Too Heavily On PPC?

The response from PPC marketing is meant to be immediate, but it is not always the best approach to take. When you spend time examining the effects of all of your marketing programs, then you start to see what types of effects your PPC campaign has on audiences and how you can enhance your marketing results by the proper balance of all of your marketing campaigns.

Which PPC Outlet Is The Best For Each Campaign?

A professional marketing organization will utilize all of the available PPC platforms to reach your audience, but you want to identify the best platforms to maximize your campaign. If you notice that Bing reaches a more technical audience, then you can use a PPC program based on the Bing search engine to sell your more technical products. By analyzing each platform and understanding the audiences they reach, you can get great results with each of your PPC campaigns.

The point of a good PPC campaign is to drive conversions and bring in revenue. More than any other form of marketing, a PPC campaign is expected to generate revenue almost immediately or else it is considered a failure. In order to increase your PPC conversions, you need to look at how your PPC campaign works as a part of your marketing efforts, and then maximize those efforts to get the best results.

How To Improve Your PPC Results

When we talk about any Internet marketing campaign, we always mention updating each campaign as an important part of the work that has to be done. But what does that mean? In the case of a pay per click (PPC) campaign, there are several things that you and your Internet marketing partner can do to improve each campaign and tweak it as you go along.

Stay Focused

Each PPC campaign should focus on a specific message or product to be successful. But your focused approach does not have to stop with a single product or marketing message. If you are noticing that customers are more interested in certain features on that product, then narrow your message down to those features to increase your PPC results.

Don’t Oversell It

Unless you have documented proof that your product is the best of its kind every manufactured, then avoid putting words to that effect in your PPC ad. As you analyze your PPC ad, try to remove any phrases like “top seller,” “best ever,” or “most innovative” in your copy. Let your message and your product stand on its own merits and do not try to oversell your product in your PPC campaign.

Become An Expert At Writing Titles

You will hear marketing experts expound on the benefits of good titles on a regular basis. But in a PPC campaign, your title could mean the difference between success or failure. A PPC ad has very little text in it, so your title becomes an extremely important element to your entire PPC campaign.

Try To Include Special Characters In Your Content

When we say that you should include special characters in your content, we do not mean astericks or brackets. We mean characters such as the copyright symbol and the trademark indicator. These types of symbols tend to draw people to your PPC ad and will increase your click-through rate. The caveat to using these symbols is that you should only use them if they actually apply to your company. If you are not the registered owner of a particular trademark, then do not put the trademark symbol in your ad.

Forget About Pricing

The price discussion is one that happens later in the sales conversation, which means that it should not be part of your PPC advertising. When you are creating a PPC ad, you want to grab the attention of the reader because your product solves a need that reader has. If the ad is successful at getting the reader’s attention, then the reader will click on the ad and you can then offer discussions about pricing.

Always Keep The Customer In Mind

You and your marketing team may be in love with one of the features on your product, but it is another feature that is getting consumers’ attention. Always use the information from your ongoing analysis of your PPC campaigns and develop content that appeals to the consumer and not your own preferences.

A PPC campaign can be extremely effective if it is done properly. By monitoring the results of your campaigns and paying attention to what consumers are telling you, it is possible to develop PPC campaigns that increase revenue and deliver a significant return on your investment.

5 Reasons Your Pay-Per-Click Campaign Failed Miserably pt2

There are no absolutes in this world, but there are trends that we can use to avoid utilizing bad marketing tactics. When it comes to pay per click marketing, there are a lot of mistakes you can make that will cost you money. But there are four critical errors that are sometimes made in pay per click campaigns that not only diminish the results the campaign gets, but they could also damage future campaigns as well.

Not Matching Landing Pages With Ad Content

A well-written pay per click ad is going to get people clicking on the link to find a certain type of content. When people click on a link and wind up at a landing page that has nothing to do with the ad content, then consumers feel duped into seeing something they don’t want to see. That is why you must be sure to create a relevant landing page for every pay per click campaign, and make sure that every link you use in your pay per click campaigns point to the right landing pages.

It is acceptable to keep old landing pages available on your website, but only if those pages are part of a pay per click campaign that is still going. Once you end a pay per click campaign, you should take down your landing page and develop a new one for your next pay per click campaign.

No Call To Action

A call to action statement at the end of your pay per click ad helps give your ad a sense of completion for the consumer, and it also inspires your audience to take action when they are done reading the ad.

A call to action can also be important if you want your audience to do something other than clicking on a link. For example, if you want customers to call a phone number or click a link for more information, then a quick call to action will make that clear and get you better results.

No Dynamic Development

When you first release a pay per click ad, it is not going to get you the results that you want. This is almost guaranteed in every campaign you will run. If you want better results, then you need to engage in ongoing development of your pay per click ad. If you are not using dynamic development to change your ad based on your results and the trends of your audience, then you will never give yourself the opportunity to maximize your results.

Not Analyzing The Competition

What is the competition doing with their pay per click ads? Is the competition doing something consistently that would indicate that it is working? In the business world, you cannot live in a bubble. You must analyze what the competition is doing, and use the competition’s own success against them.

You Didn’t Make Changes During The Campaign

If you are running a pay-per-click campaign and you are getting consistent data that tells you that a particular set of keywords is not working, then you need to change those keywords. Too many people allow a flawed campaign to run and then wonder why the results are not what they wanted. Monitor your pay-per-click campaign and make changes to improve its results as the campaign moves along.

You Didn’t Hire A Professional Organization

A good pay per click campaign is developed over time and conditioned to reach a certain type of audience. When you find pay per click tactics that work, you should utilize those tactics and continue to develop them for future success. When your pay per click campaign starts to show poor results, then they are reasons for that. Your job is to find the reasons, correct them, and get your pay per click campaign back on a successful path.

5 Reasons Your Pay-Per-Click Campaign Failed Miserably pt1

After investing a significant amount of time and money into a pay-per-click campaign designed to introduce your newest product, you were disappointed at the lackluster results you saw. As with any type of Internet marketing, pay-per-click marketing is not for the faint of heart. It is as much an art as it is a science, and there are some very good reasons why your latest pay-per-click campaign failed miserably.

Your Timing Is Awful

Did you know that the best day of the week to search for new help wanted ads is Tuesday? Did you know that the best time on Tuesday to look for those ads is 11:00 a.m.? Recruiters know this type of information because they need to be able to maximize their efforts when it comes to finding the right candidates.

Is your market ready for a new product from your company? Are you overlapping product releases and flooding the market? Have your customers already spent their budgets and now have no money to buy your new product? With pay-per-click marketing, timing is everything. If your timing is off, then your results will not be what you want them to be.

Your Keywords Are Old

The Internet has created its own vocabulary that marketing experts struggle to stay up to date with each and every day. When was the last time you updated your pay-per-click keywords? Is there Internet slang involved in your marketplace that you are not using? If your keywords are old, then your results will be poor.

Your Campaign Did Not Run Long Enough

If your research shows that you need a pay-per-click campaign to run for six weeks to be effective but you only have the funds to run it for three weeks, then you should wait until you have the rest of the funds before you start your campaign. You can’t buy momentum for a marketing campaign, but you can lose all of your momentum if you do not run your campaign long enough.

Your Network Is Not Reaching Your Target Audience

Internet marketing professionals are constantly updating and changing their pay-per-click networks to make sure that they accurately reflect the trends of each network. If you are not using the right kind of pay-per-click network for your marketing campaign, then you will not reach your target audience.

Successful pay-per-click campaigns are created for customers by experienced and professional marketing organizations. If your campaigns are consistently not working, then it is time to question whether or not your marketing organization is getting the job done for you.

Good pay-per-click programs can significantly expand your company’s marketing influence, and boost your sales. But when things start to go wrong with your campaigns, you need to make changes if you want to get the best possible return on your marketing investment.

The Beginner’s Guide to Pay-Per-Click Part II

Last week, we highlighted some of the basics of PPC, so this week we’ll take things a step further and talk about some of the ways you can leverage PPC to improve your business.

Use PPC to test your product ideas

Remember that old saying ‘build it and they will come?’ Yeah, that’s not true. I mean if everyone who ever owned a business instantly got paid because they had a product, we’d all have billion dollar-plus valuations and you wouldn’t be here and we wouldn’t be writing this.

Sad to say, but great products don’t build great companies. Go to any market in Asia, Australia or South American and you’ll find things there you can’t find anywhere else in the world, but then again – you can’t find them anywhere else in the world. To get products off the ground – you’ll need to ASK people if they’d use your product first.

PPC can help you conduct real, meaningful market research on your product to see if A.) There’s a demand for your product and B) if people would be interested in signing up to test your product.  Gaining this information will help you pivot and adjust your offerings to better meet the needs of your audience.

Make sure you’re not a victim. Find your audience first, then launch the product second.

PPC for Nonprofits

Yes, political people figured it out, too….

Now that we’re done with the buzz kill, politicians are important to watch – not just for the obvious reasons – but also for how they raise money. Those implications are broad for nonprofit organizations who are always money-starved and looking for new ways to attract donors.

The one thing politicians have learned and leveraged well is that it doesn’t matter what kind of media people are using – if you can get in front of them, you can get your message out. Plain and simple. So if you’re a nonprofit, you need to tap into the minds of those who are already looking to hand you money.

PPC can help you get in front of those eyes and find the best ways to reach those who want to hand you money by targeting the right key words and phrases for your campaign. PPC simply gives you a cost-effective way to ask so that you can receive.

PPC to test advertising

Sounds dizzying, right? Advertising your advertising?

Remember the company HipChat? They were the company that used a popular billboard to advertise their site. They did well, got backlinks, free media mentions, PR, etc. but they also spent $7k to run the advertisement for four weeks.

So will you get the same results if you buy a billboard? Probably not! But the point here is that offline ads are really expensive. PPC can help you test out your messaging FIRST before you plunk down the big bucks for the traditional stuff. Not only can you see whether your ad will work, but you can also maximize its potential.

Use PPC to test titles

Ever wonder why some companies are successful and others just bust? How some conferences and events end up filled to the brim while others look like sponsored ghost towns? Sometimes, it has to do with something as easy as the title of an event.

Titles, product names, event descriptions – they can have a dramatic impact on your success or failure. They help garner buzz, interest and eventually – money – from your core demographics. PPC allows you test titles and product names to see which ones gain the most attention. It also helps you get over your own creativity. More often than not, the thing WE THINK is a great idea, isn’t. PPC can certainly humble you and in many ways – save you from yourself.