The art of the pay-per-click start

[arpan911]

Setting up a pay-per-click campaign is simple, right? Practically all paid search engines especially the top-tiered ones like Google Adwords and Overture provide extensive training materials. It is advertised that in less than three hours, you can select your keywords, write your ads and have a campaign either submitted for an editorial review at Overture or active on Google.

It sounds so unbelievably simple! But have you heard the saying “if it sounds too good to be true it probably is?”

Effective marketing strategies take experience, time and effort to achieve worth-while performance. Anyone can write a direct mail letter, buy a list of business addresses, add postage stamps and drop the letters in the mail. The actions involved in direct mail marketing are relatively ordinary. Yet highly experienced direct marketers who send and test millions of direct mail pieces each year achieve about a 1% - 2% average response rate. So what type of response rate would you expect an ordinary person to achieve? Likewise, the ordinary efforts setting up pay-per-click campaigns doesn’t equate to website performance.

The start of a pay-per-click campaign initiates a process similar to those used in traditional marketing. The process involves strategic planning, creative development, measurable tracking and articulate execution. The success of your pay-per-click campaign is dependent on the thought that precedes the efforts and the continual re-assessment of the results following each set of efforts. Let me explain.
Strategic Planning – Knowing Your Target

Before setting up an account in Overture or Google Adwords, consider your target market relative to your product or service being offered on your website.

* What benefits does your product or service satisfy for your customer?
* What are the demographics and psychographics of you primary target market?
* What customer circumstances does your product or service support?

By intimately understanding your target market, you are able to start the keyword selection process. Your objective is selecting relevant keywords that connect your customer’s preconceived expectation with your product or service.

Search behavior (consumer behavior in general) is difficult to predict. Start by reviewing your traditional marketing literature, listen to your sales people perform a client presentation or sales call, research your competitions’ keywords (your competition includes all alternatives to your product or service) and review existing web log files to determine what product or service terms, customer circumstances, or common language your customers react to or attach to your product or service. Don’t be surprised if these terms are different than what you logically expected.

Your goal is to generate a keyword list that tests the bounds of Overture’s and Google Adword’s relevancy standards. A longer keyword list is preferable at the start since you will ultimately filter it down based on performance.
Keywords Open Doors to “Wanting” Customers

Know that the keywords you select are doors that open you to new visitor opportunities - if you miss a door than you miss the potentially huge opportunity waiting behind it.

Do not rely on broad, advanced or phrase matches to catch additional keywords. It’s true that these matching options increase traffic but they can devastate performance if you do not have a sophisticated keyword-level tracking system. One keyword under a broad matching option could represent 80% of your cost and deliver only 20% of the return.
Your Ad Serves as a Magnate Attracting Qualified Visitors to Your Website

By intimately understanding your customer you maximize your ability to write specific ads that attract qualified visitors and reduce click waste. Words are your magnets for attracting your target market to your website. Even one, single word can have an immense affect on your click-through rate.

For example, while working for a client, I ran two identical keyword ads on Adwords except one used the word, “tested” the other “proven”. The “tested” ad pulled a 7% click-through rate while the “proven” one barely reached 1.5%. More so, the “tested’ ad converted at a higher sales rate than the “proven”.

Choosing the most compelling words and associating the strongest customer benefits is essential because the ad space allocated is so limited in Google Adwords and not much better in Overture. Although conventional wisdom dictates how to write a performance-driven ad like include free shipping, pricing or guarantees in the ad copy, it is difficult to know exactly what attracts the highest number of qualified visitors. The solution is testing all variables.
The Pay-per-Click Campaign Structure Sets the Stage for Individual Keyword-level Tracking

Setting up your pay-per-click campaign requires a hierarchical structure that is instrumental to individual keyword-level tracking. The natural structure in Overture enables individual keyword-level tracking under the standard matching option. Google Adwords’ recommended structure however either throws off the ability to track at the individual keyword-level or disables the opportunity to use A/B split-testing per individual keyword.

Unfortunately, pay-per-click search engine’s supply training materials focused on “driving traffic” and not on “driving performance”. The difference between traffic and performance is economically significant. For Google Adwords, an incorrect campaign structure is one of the most common obstacles I have experienced while working with new clients to turnaround their poor to mediocre performing pay-per-click campaigns.

After your keywords are selected, your initial ads strategically written and your campaign structure setup, you have to add a tracking system. Overture’s and Google Adword’s conversion tracking tools are not recommended by most pay-per-click experts but if it’s your only option than it is better than no tracking at all. It is more effective to have some insight to your keyword performance than operating in the virtual dark.

Once your campaigns are submitted to Google Adwords, Overture or any other pay-per-click search engine, your work has really just started. But we’ll leave that for round two.

Starting an ultimately effective pay-per-click campaign is difficult. Although the paid search engines like Google Adwords and Overture (now re-branded as Yahoo Search Marketing Solutions) want you to believe otherwise. A goal of “getting website traffic” is logically appealing since marketers tend to directly associate website traffic to producing website actions like sales, subscriptions and so on. The problem is “all website traffic is NOT created equal.” Just because you receive “traffic” does not mean you will achieve website actions.

For example, if you are selling a real estate course on buying foreclosures and you bid on the keyword “real estate” – you may receive thousands of website visitors yet not sell a single real estate course. A large percentage of the businesses that come to us for assistance relate their pain from this experience by commenting, “We were getting x,xxx visitors to the website per month and no sales, we can’t figure out why?”

Let me tell you “why?” – All traffic is not created equal. What this means is that you need to attract visitors (your target market) who are most relevant to your product or service. In the example above, the keyword “real estate” is so general that its relevance is diluted especially for a niche market for a course on buying foreclosures.

You need to actually perform a search for each of your primary keywords and look at the type of websites that rank high in the natural search listings. They have earned (well...in most cases) a high ranking because they are highly relevant to the meaning of the keyword.

A search engine’s mission is to deliver highly relevant search results to their customers. Therefore the natural search results indicate what the search engines believe most effectively satisfies their customer’s expectations when they search on a particular keyword.

Paid search increases the simplicity of “getting website traffic” yet the difficulty lies at the heart of your primary goal - getting actions that drive business growth like sales, subscriptions or contact us form completions. Here lays the challenge not advertised by the paid search engines – how to generate website actions.

You are faced with a number of real challenges when aimed at achieving website actions from your paid search engine campaign. The challenges focus on two key aspects: the cost you pay per click and the relevancy you present to the click-through. These are important because they affect your business growth in terms of conversion and profitability – the intersection of website visitors with website actions.
Paid Search – Bidding Strategies

The first aspect is your cost per click. It is controlled by your willingness to bid and budget a certain amount for an ad placement. All pay-per-click search engines possess unique bidding nuances. However, for the two largest, Google Adwords and Overture do not become fixated on the top bid position. Test how each keyword performs in achieving your primary website actions all the way up to the seventh bid position.

Depending on your product or service, you may be amazed how bid position six attracts less click-throughs but produces more website actions. Or maybe position four generates more actions. Regardless - test, test and test – the outcome may mean lower costs and higher actions for you.

One tested strategy is to determine the keyword “click price” you are willing to pay using your performance metrics (e.g. your cost per action, conversion rate, value of a buyer and so on) and then search for that keyword on the major search engines where your ad will appear. Check out where each bid position is listed on the search results page.

Recently Overture and Google Adwords have increased their number of displayed results to up to eight “sponsor results” or paid ads on the first page. In some cases, the fourth and fifth or fifth and sixth bid positions will show at the bottom of the first search results page and again at the top, right margin of the page – in essence two ads for the price of one. Be aware of this strategic opportunity!

Here is another proven strategy that has worked wonders for our clients. In Overture’s direct advertiser center, a marketer only views the top five bid placements. Bid a penny below the fifth bid position to attain the sixth one. Typically, because this bid placement is not “visible” in the marketers’ control panel, you can obtain a great bid placement at a dramatically lower click cost with sustainable or increasing conversion rate.

For example, we set a real estate client’s bid for a high demand / high cost keyword to the sixth bid position and paid $0.59 less than the fifth position and increased actions significantly while drastically reducing their cost per action. Even better, this bid position was sustained for the keyword for over four months! Because it’s under the “radar screen” in the Direct Advertiser Center in Overture and marketers never bothered to view the actual search listing results, we made a killing! If you want to conquer your competition – follow this strategy.
Landing Page Development

Have you heard of landing pages? If not, you must get familiar with them this week and immediately start implementing them for your paid search campaigns especially your primary and most competitive keywords. Why the sense of urgency? Because highly-relevant landing pages have proven to increase website actions.

In one of many possible examples, a client’s website actions to website visitors’ ratio increased from 0.7% to 10.8% in one month because of implementing and testing different landing pages. That’s a ten times increase! Landing pages work.

So, what are landing pages? Landing pages are simply web pages designed specifically for a keyword or related group of keywords. They are highly relevant to the keyword searched and consistent with your ad’s claim. They immediately focus a visitor’s attention to a primary action. In essence – landing pages ask your visitors to take an action.

One of the reportedly major reasons why pay-per-click marketing programs fall short of their intended goal is because businesses direct all of their click-throughs to their home page. Since most businesses’ home pages are designed to serve mutliple audiences (i.e. media relations, investors, current clients, potential prospects, customer services, etc.) they do not provide the level of relevancy and consistency expected from the visitor.

If your pay-per-click marketing is not living up to your expectations, consider which web pages you are sending visitors to. Are they relevant and consistent with your pay-per-click ads and keywords? Do they offer too many calls-to-action? Do they “fit” the expectations of the visitor searching on the particular keyword?

For example, are you sending a visitor searching on the keyword “Sony LCD TV” to a web page with twenty varieties of electronic products? An effectively designed landing page would present the visitor a “Sony LCD TV” with customer benefit oriented copy, an immediate “buy now” call to action and all applicable guarantee, shipping, customer service and return policies.

A study conducted in April 2004 by Atlas DMT called “Search Listing URL and Conversion Rate” connected the use of landing pages to their affect on increasing website actions. The study showed the following astounding results…

* Headline of landing page matches keyword = 0.79%.
* Headline of landing page is on Home Page = 6.31%.
* Headline of landing page matches theme of Keyword = 9.28%.
* Headline of landing page matches specifically to Keyword = 11.81%.

The study showed that the more relevant your landing page is to your website visitors, the higher your website actions.

Landing pages also provide an excellent format to “split-test” different relevancy strategies like changing your headline, changing colors or graphical images, and alternating actions to determine which produce the best outcomes. If you are not familiar with split-testing (also called A/B split-testing) then do a little research – it has emerged in the mainstream as a proven strategy. But a word of caution, don’t get caught up in the scientific application of split-testing. Instead use a simple tool like www.Hypertracker.com and focus on trends – like are your website actions increasing or decreasing.

Marketing whether online or offline has historically been viewed as a cost of business which breeds simplemindedness. A laggard’s attitude of “why spend the extra time to achieve a positive ROI?” To some degree in the offline world, the complications and costs of tracking campaign results supported this attitude; however, the connectivity of the Internet enables real-time campaign tracking. It allows the extra effort focused on generating positive ROIs to reap significant rewards to those who learn and implement proven and tested strategies.

For your paid search campaigns, do not take the simple road to get more website visitors. Instead take the “road less traveled” to get more website actions. Start implementing landing pages and strategically building a paid search campaign that generates astounding ROIs and conquers your competition. The strategies are now in your hands – the rest is up to you.


By: Kevin Gold

[maggots]

my god, excellent article from kevin gold, very informative
where did you get it Arpan?

[mini_0]

PAy per click is better option or not depends upon your budget also . Choosing between Pay-Per-Click Marketing and Search Engine Optimization is not a matter of measuring return on investment. There are major differences between the two approaches and the choice between one or the other is based on different factors; you must understand the differences before a final decision is made. Here are the steps to choosing between the two.