Do You PPC? How Do You Measure Effectiveness?

Several months ago, I was called upon to help a local business who was spending a lot of money driving traffic to their website, using the Google Adwords system. They had done no research, tested no landing pages, had no visitor tracking in place, and when they didn’t get the results they wanted, they were simply raising their CPC bids or daily spend to get more traffic!

When I asked them how they knew if it was working or not, they told me…

“People say they found us online”

If this sounds like your Paid Search plan, visit the Search Marketing page and complete the short questionnaire to the right. I can save you money and increase the effectiveness of your paid campaigns today!

What is PPC?

For those unaware, Adwords is PPC, or Pay-Per-Click, paid search engine marketing. The premise is simple enough – you pay Google to have your website show up in the sponsored links section of the search and/or content network, when visitors search for specific words you choose to be seen for. The CPC, Cost-Per-Click you pay depends on several factors, one of which being the amount you are willing to pay for each visitor, another being the competitive nature of the phrases you chose.

PPC Best Practices

If you take advantage of any type of PPC or Banner advertising, there are a few things you should to be doing. If you don’t take these simple steps, you will have no real way to measure the effectiveness of your ad money! You might as well be throwing it away.

• Always Have a Plan, or Conversion Goal, for every Ad Campaign!
• If you Have More than 1 Goal – Use Separate Campaigns!
• Never Send Paid Traffic to a Page without a Clear Call to Action for the Visitor!
• Never Send Paid Traffic to your Website Home Page!
• Always Setup or Optimize a Specific Landing Page for Each of your Campaigns!
• Always Split Test Landing Pages to Determine Which Convert Best!
• Narrow Each Ad Group to Only a Few Target Phrases

Finally, and the most important aspect of ANY paid campaign, Track your Visitors to the N’th Degree!

If you fail to address any of the steps above, you are simply wasting your advertising money, and shooting in the dark with your ad campaigns!

Let Me Help You Succeed

When the company above told me they knew their plan was working because Customer said they found them on the web, I started asking more questions.

• How do you know they didn’t find you in organic search?
• How do you know another website didn’t send them?
• Do you know exactly which website sent them?
• Which campaign triggered the call?
• Which keywords triggered the action?
• Which site page did they land on?
• Which site page caused them them to take action?
• Are you using specific website forms on specific pages?

In the end, the company was paying $150/day and averaging $3.15 cents per click, for something they had no clue was working! Imagine if they knew that “This Specific Keyword” sending visitors to “This Specific Page” resulted in a phone call or form submission 75% of the time.

Visit the Search Marketing page, and get started toward successful campaigns today!