Many Internet businesses eventually use pay-per-click (PPC) advertising as part of their overall marketing strategy.  Sometimes they use it so effectively that they make enough in immediate sales to cover the cost of the advertising.  Other times they look to recoup those expenses over a longer period by using the PPC campaign as a means of obtaining leads that they use to develop a lasting relationship with new prospects.  Other marketers focus their PPC campaigns upon gathering research and planning data that will reap benefits for years to come.  Of course, none of these objectives need exclude the other possibilities.  

I am writing this article to draw your attention to using pay-per-click as a research tool, although you should feel free to make a profit at the same time  (Of course this assumes that you already know how to conduct thorough keyword research prior to launching your advertising campaigns.

*  Tracking software, such as the free Google Analytics and may commercial packages, will provide you with the exact key phrase used by all of your visitors to get to your PPC landing pages.  Obviously, if you set up your campaign properly, you know which of the phrases that you bid on are bringing the visitors, however, unless you are using only exact match phrases, that does not alert you to the precise search terms entered by your traffic.  As a simple, if lengthy, example, let’s say that you bid on a broad match phrase such as, “lamp green buy.”  (Of course, you would have the quotation marks around those words, if it is a broad match.)  You could have individual visitors who searched for “buy expensive tiffany lamp,” “buy a used green lamp in Atlanta or Marietta,” buy a green or yellow ceramic lamp” and other phrases.  Clearly those visitors are looking for very different sorts of green lamps to buy.  Based upon the search phrases that your discover and the number of people you identify using them, you may want to create new permanent pages for your site stressing those phrases.  You can work on your SEO for those pages in order to get organic search engine traffic to those new pages.  This effectively allows you to spread the cost of your pay-per-click campaign across many years.

*  Test your headings (headlines) on your PPC landing pages.  Set up two pages for the same ad group.  The pages should be identical in every other way except for the heading.  You might have a content management system or software that can alternate those.  It’s also very easy to simply change the landing page to the different version within your ad after you have received a sufficient number of clicks to provide your with useful data—at least 100 clicks.  Compare the conversion results from the two versions.  If there is a clear winner, keep it in the rotation and set up another test with a different alteration in the heading.

*  Conduct the same format test as with headlines, but test a different variable.  You may want to test listing benefits followed by features versus having the features list come before the benefits.  Or you could test one page with an image and another that has a short video display.  

As you perform the tests on the content of your landing pages, be certain that you do not change more than one variable at a time.  Do not change both the headline and the image at the same time, or it will be difficult for you to determine which variable it is that makes the difference in your conversion results or the relative impact of each.  (Actually, if you have some statistical sophistication, you can set up a test in which you change multiple variables at once across multiple versions of the landing page.)

The major point to go away from this is that you should be using your PPC campaigns to do more than bring visitors to your site and hope that they will buy something.  PPC can be expensive, so maximize your benefits from those dollars to accomplish as much as possible.  Gather data, analyze it, and act decisively based upon the results!