Are You Making Pay-Per-Clicks Pay?
Using PPCs (pay-per-click engines) to get visitors to your web site can be a very effective way to drive traffic to your web site and increase your profits.
If you do it right, it will effectively cost you nothing as the extra sales more than cover your ongoing costs - but if you do it wrong, you can end up spending a lot of money for zero profit.
This article demonstrates the correct way to use PPCs for maximum benefits and high profit levels for your web site.
There are three golden rules for using PPCs effectively, and this is in common with all online advertising - track, track and track.
Seriously, you need to track absolutely everything, and scrupulously, so that you know exactly how many sales, and therefore how much profit, each link from the PPC generates for your business. It's the only way to know whether a particular keyword is bringing you a profit or not.
The software I personally use for this, and which I know guys like Stephen Pierce use too, allows me to set up any number of tracking links, and for each one I can see detailed statistics on click-throughs, sales, and even 'actions' such as subscriptions.
It gives me detailed reports on which campaigns are profitable, tells me what my ROI (return on investment) is on particular campaigns, and even allows me to do split-testing by sending traffic to differing URLs.
This allows me to maximize the effectiveness of all my PPC expenditure (and I can use it for all my other tracking purposes too).
[To start using PPCs effectively, you need to track everything from now onwards. Here's the ad tracking software that I use and recommend: http://www.pro-analyzer.com. Click the link and grab yourself a copy, it will pay for itself in days.]
It's fairly unsurprising that different keywords and keyword phrases can have a huge difference in the number of sales they generate, and therefore their profitability. Perhaps more surprising is the fact that different PPCs can bring you very different results even when you are using the same keywords.
This only underlines how important tracking is for your business. To use PPCs for the maximum profits, you simply focus on the profitable campaigns, and stop those that aren't profitable.
Google Adwords allows you to test which ads attract the most clicks. To take advantage of this, you can set up a number of ads for each ad group, and these are shown in rotation. Then, when you examine your stats for the particular ad group, for each ad it shows you the clickthrough rate (CTR) - you can then concentrate on the ad or ads that generate the most clickthroughs, and attempt to maximize this further. You should also set up a separate tracking link for each ad though, as some ads may generate more sales even if they have a lower CTR.
"What percentage of advertisers are taking advantage of the Google AdWords opportunity? A growing percentage, to be sure. But only a small percentage of these are really doing well. Will you be one of them?"
Read a special report on how to unleash the power of Google AdWords - http://takanomi.com/adwords |
But tracking is only one side of the coin - you also need to maximize the profitability of every click.
One way to do this is to try to capture the details of as many of your visitors as possible, via the use of popups and subscription forms on your web page, with proper incentives for your visitors to hand over their name and email address to you. This not only means you can follow-up with them in order to drive more sales home; but you are also increasing what can be a very targetted and therefore profitable list, and you'll be able to make other targetted offers to them in the future.
With PPCs like Google Adwords, this can be more difficult as they don't permit the use of popups. You can get away with using OptInOvers as they won't be picked up via their popup detecting spiders, but a human reviewer may ask you to remove it if they see it on your site.
If you have popups on your site normally, and are using, or you intend to use, Google Adwords or other PPCs where popups are not permitted, the easiest way to remove the popups just for these particular PPCs is as follows:
- Copy your main page (eg. 'index.html') and save it as a separate file (eg. 'indexgoogle.html')
- Remove all trace of popup code from your new page
- Send the PPC traffic to this popup-free page
And remember, it doesn't matter if popups are elsewhere on your site, the only restriction is on the page that the visitor arrives at (the 'landing page') after clicking on the Google Adwords link.
This means that you could also use a technique where the landing page is just a teaser page for the main site, containing some information directly related to the ad, but its primary focus is to encourage visitors to click through to your main site, where of course you can use popups as normal.
Another option would be make lead generation the primary objective of the landing page - try using a mini sales page that simply invites visitors to leave their name and email address, rather than trying to directly sell them anything, and then direct them to your actual sales page via your follow-up messages.
So, to maximize your use of PPCs, track carefully, and maximize the value you get from visitors that do click through - remember, you're paying for them to visit your site, and it's up to you to recoup this investment and make it work for you.
Need content for your web site or ezine? You can republish this article, but please just write to me first to let me know, and I'll send you a short bio to include.
Did you find this month's article useful? Let me know. Here's what one subscriber had to say about the article we ran last month on optimizing your JavaScript - if you missed it, you can read it now at http://www.takanomi.com/articles/seojscript.shtml:
"Hi Steve! I just wanted to write to say thank you for your article on
javascript and search engine rankings. My fear was exactly what you'd
written about... Too much code at the top of the page keeping the engines
from finding and rating my keywords (for better rankings). I know enough
about meta tags and keywords to realize that some spiders will 'only go so
deep' on a page.
"I followed your directions (very easy to follow!) setting up the strip of
javascript on the page and creating the js file - uploading both. My test
page is the main page of http://www.mywizardads.com.
"Now the page not only loads more quickly, but all that code is no longer 'in
the way.' I'm sure this will have a positive impact on future search engine
rankings!
"Thank you so much!
"Theresa Cahill"
If you have feedback, please just let me know.
While talking of my face, let's talk dripping blood, missing teeth, stitches. Youch!
