When it comes to Paid advertising, there is a lot to know and a lot to focus on before you begin your campaign. Ultimately, you want to improve website conversions and lower pay-per-click expenses while increasing website traffic and sales.

The beautiful thing about Pay Per Click, is that you can obtain highly targeted website traffic that is easy to track.  You can obtain reports of which key terms are converting and which are not converting. 

I don’t always believe that having the number one listing is the best, you may obtain a lot of impulse clicks that are not necessarily reading your ad – which can be very costly. 

Conversion Rates
Conversion rates always vary dramatically depending on multiple variables. For example, higher priced services and products typically have a lower conversion rate.  Website’s that are not optimized properly will have lower conversion rates.  Many companies will design “landing pages” around specific key terms to help put the user in front of content specifically geared towards their search. 

Conversion rates can range from 0% up to as high as 30% (very rare). Typical conversion rates are around .3% to 2%.

Tracking Paid Advertising Campaigns

The beautiful thing about paid advertising internet marketing is that you can use programs like Google Analytics to track what keywords are converting in to customers at a higher rate, and then determine where to better spend your money.  Google Analytics is an amazing program with endless possibilities.

Obviously you need to find out the campaigns cost effectiveness by determining profit obtained and branding accomplished, however branding isn’t always an easy factor to track – because certain website’s will brand better than others.

Research Your Competition

You need to view your competition’s web sites and determine whether you need to take online marketing inspiration from your competition – to ensure that your website is going to convert well and stands out from the crowd.  Look at what ads are in which order for your competition. Get a feel for the industry you are getting in to. Often times the number one ranking advertiser isn’t making much money, and some times they are throwing away a large amount of money. You don’t need to compete for the #1 position to succeed and be profitable.

Fine Tune Your Website Before Starting Your Campaign

If you already have website visitors that are finding you under targeted keyword searches – you should research your conversion rates and attempt to reduce your website bounce rate as well before implementing a pay per click campaign. I also recommend performing online surveys and asking others to give you input to increase conversions.  Most website’s will have a 50-70% bounce rate, which is very high and can be very expensive if people are clicking your advertisement and leaving. If you are a larger business, you can always hire conversion and usability experts like DataFlurry to improve website conversions.

You always want to answer several mental questions for your visitors to make sure they don’t have any mental blockages to inquiring or purchasing from you, such as:

1. Why are you the best provider of this product or service?
2. What set’s your product or service apart from the competition?
3. Why should this individual trust your company to provide quality services or products?
4. What is the incentive to act now?
5. Provide a personal touch – whether it be videos, testimonials or something like this.
6. If you charge noticeable more than the competition, you must make website visitors understand why your quality is worth the cost.

You Probably Won’t Be Profitable To Begin

A large amount of clicks that you pay for will not result in a sale, inquiry or anything. If you only have a 1% conversion rate and you are paying .50 per click, that means that you will pay $50 on average for one client or customer. When you begin your Paid advertising campaign, you must understand that often times you will not be profitable immediately.  Also you will be spending time trying to improve your website to result in higher conversions, so their may be a delay before you start obtaining online conversions. You should always be improving your website to accommodate your paid advertising campaigns.

Pay Per Click Can Help You To Determine Where To Focus SEO Efforts

Many companies decide on keywords for their search engine optimization campaign to increase natural search engine traffic without any type of research.  You are going to probably spend several hundred or thousand dollars on a search engine optimization campaign, so you better make sure you are focusing on the right words! Pay per click is a great way to do this. (DataFlurry always performs in depth keyword research before starting search engine optimization campaigns).

Why Should You Use Pay Per Click Advertising?

Pay per click advertising can provide more targeted leads than any other marketing medium – because you can pay for website visitors that are looking to buy exactly what you are offering at the time they click on your paid advertisement. This is an amazing marketing and branding medium that is highly effective.

How Many Pay Per Click Companies Are Available?

There are a large number of paid advertising providers on the internet. However, I recommend new individuals use Google Adwords, Microsoft Adcenter and Yahoo Search Marketing for beginners.  The reason I recommend these 3 search engines is simple, they have a very large visitor base so that you can obtain fast response to advertisements – and you can also track results more accurately and the limit to advertising is almost limitless.  Another great factor is that you can often times start with these companies by only paying for $5-$20 of advertising without large advertising minimums.

There are many other paid advertising companies online such as Business.com, Facebook, Myspace, Ask, Enhance, 7Search, Miva, Kanoodle, StumbleUpon and so many more.

How Do I Design Landing Pages?

Design your landing page with out a large amount of junk, make everything to the point and easy to view.  I recommend only using text that is very convincing and promising. Make major points you need to prove stand out with different color text, Bold Text and images that prove a point.

In order to lower your bounce rate, you should use Large Bold Text showing the keywords being searched for. For example, if a customer was searching for Shade Tents, you should use text similar to the below phrase – in a very prominent position at the top of the page.

Find Shade Tents Below!

How Do I Create & Write My Ads?

You must locate keywords that are specifically focused on your product or service!  Make sure to put yourself in your potential visitors shoes and think whether or not you are targeting the right visitors. You should also think outside of the box for keyword ideas to select. Doing this can help you save a lot of money if you shy away from only competing for popular keywords. If you implement more elaborate keywords in to your pay per click advertising campaign, you will save money – and can sometimes obtain even higher targeted visitors!

Writing a great title for your ad depends on your type of audience and product or service. You can come up with great ideas by watching newspaper and magazine ads headlines and slogans.

Writing of the title – However, often times – simply having the phrase you are targeting as the title will obtain higher click-thru rates than making something up.  Plus, if using the keywords within your advertisements title, most search engines will bold the words that were searched for – so that it will stand out more than your competition.

When writing the description, start with something action invoking, and then also include the keywords that are being searched for.  For example, if someone was targeting shade tents, I would create an ad like this

Title:
Tent Shades

Description:
Stay Cool With Quality
Tent Shades, Act Now.

Longer titles aren’t always better, people want to find what they are looking for, and they don’t always need to be impressed with our creativity.

I always recommend creating landing pages for your keyword campaigns, this will help to focus on selling each visitor to the best of your ability. However if your website already has an excellent conversion rate, maybe it isn’t necessary.

Hopefully this has helped you to learn more about pay per click advertising campaigns. We manage PPC campaigns for customers that want to hire seasoned professionals. Make sure to stick with it and work hard to improve your conversion rates, it’s very possible to be profitable with pay per click, but it takes time.

Joel Mclaughlin