This is the fourth post in a series on Pay-per-click advertising.  Lots of our clients struggle to understand PPC so they can evaluate it as an investment, compare it to traditional advertising, figure out how it works, or sometimes just explain it to their boss.  The explanations can get rather complex, so I decided to make a series of blog posts to help educate clients, readers, and anyone wanting to learn more.   This is the last article in the Pay Per Click Advertising 101 series.

 What You Can Learn – And What To Do With It

 A well-planned and well-executed PPC campaign can achieve your advertising goals AND a positive return on your advertising investment.   Data collected from your campaigns can help you answer important questions about your ad campaign, your website and your business.   What we didn’t cover last time – what this post is about – is what you can DO with all these answers.  Certainly you can use the information to improve your PPC ad campaign (we can do that for you).  But the insights you’ll gain can also go further than that.

 Critical things you can learn about your market

• What search terms are people using when they look for a product or service like what my company offers?
• Where (what websites) are people are coming from to visit my website?
• What words, designs, or ad copy get them to spend more time on my site?
• What gets them to take the actions I want them to take on my site?
• How much revenue am I generating for the cost of my PPC campaign?

How to Use What You’ve Learned (more…)

This is the second post in a series on Pay-per-click advertising.  Lots of our clients struggle to understand PPC so they can evaluate it as an investment, compare it to traditional advertising, figure out how it works, or sometimes just explain it to their boss.  The explanations can get rather complex, so I decided to make a series of blog posts to help educate clients, readers, and anyone wanting to learn more.   This is the second article in the Pay Per Click Advertising 101 series.

The Control Levers

Picture us inside a big black box.  Big – as in the size of your house.  On one wall, picture rows of knobs or levers, and then imagine us, on your behalf, poised to turn them, pull them, or simply adjust and tune them.   In reality, all the knobs and levers are on our computer, controlled with a simple mouse click.  Best of all, they take effect immediately and will start generating immediate feedback.  When it’s done well, PPC gives a level of control that’s superior to nearly every other form of advertising.  Here’s what we’re controlling to make your PPC campaign work its best for you:

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This is the first post in a series on Pay-per-click advertising.  Lots of our clients struggle to understand PPC so they can evaluate it as an investment, compare it to traditional advertising, figure out how it works, or sometimes just explain it to their boss.  The explanations can get rather complex, so I decided to make a series of blog posts to help educate clients, readers, and anyone wanting to learn more.   This is the first article in the Pay Per Click Advertising 101 series.

 PPC Advertising:  It’s All About Control and ROI

Many clients we talk with start out feeling wary of pay per click (PPC) advertising.   Maybe they’ve tried it and felt it was a waste of their money.  Maybe they’ve read about scams or been approached by PPC salesmen they don’t trust.  Maybe they’ve seen false or deceptive claims in sponsored ads on Google.  Whatever the source of concern, PPC advertising has suffered from undeserved negative attention because many people don’t give it the patience & attention it needs to perform well.  It’s true that PPC can be wasteful if you “set it and forget it.”  If ads are not tended and managed, they can burn through money FAST and never have a chance to achieve your goals.   On the other hand, a well-crafted and well-maintained PPC campaign can achieve a greater return on your marketing investment than almost any other form of advertising.    As in most things, doing it well makes the difference.

 PPC Goals

The goals of your PPC campaign should be to reach your intended audience, deliver a compelling message, incent them to take an action, and measure your effectiveness so you can improve next time around.  Ultimately, your goal is to achieve a return on your investment for every ad you run, e.g. make more money in new revenues than you spend on each ad.  You do this by throwing a broad net when you start; then, over time narrowing it to a laser focus on just the search terms and ad copy that work for you.  The immediate goal is to make constant improvements in your campaign; longer term, you’ll make statistically significant improvements in your bottom line and gain insights that will improve your marketing efforts overall.

 How it Works

A PPC campaign starts with keyword research, to determine a broad list of search terms you want to test.  The goal is to optimize your ad copy and landing page copy using the words that your potential customers use to describe your offerings.  How do you find this out?  

 When we setup a PPC campaign, we use a calculated approach and a variety of specialized tools.  We split an ad campaign into multiple ad groups to test effectiveness of ad copy, landing pages, and specific keyword phrases.  If necessary, we’ll create multiple campaigns to test different geographical regions and different groups of keyword search terms.   We then perform iterative testing of these multiple variations (called multivariate testing) — let them run, collect data, analyze the data, and improve.  This is the essence of PPC advertising campaigns — ongoing iterative optimization.  Throughout the process, using our experience and tools to constantly tweak and optimize, we keep the best performing variations and update the worst, in an ongoing process of improvement.

 Look for my next posting, Part 2 of the series on PPC Advertisting, called “PPC Advertising – Controlling the Inputs to Optimize the Results.”  Any questions so far?  Want to share your own experience?  Feel free to leave a comment below.