Use Your Pay-Per-Click Budget for Long Term Growth
Most marketers on the web use PPC (pay-per-click) eventually within their broader marketing mix. Much of the time these businesses hope that the increase in sales will be at least sufficient to pay for the advertising expenses and, perhaps, even create additional profit. Other times they look to recover those advertising costs over a longer period by using the PPC campaign as a means of obtaining leads that they use to develop a lasting relationship with a prospect. Still other times, the focus of some Internet marketers during a PPC campaign includes using the data that they collect for research and planning purposes.
I am writing this article to draw your attention to using pay-per-click as a research tool (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. If you set up your advertising campaign so that each ad group (group of related keywords) delivers traffic to a separate landing page, you will know only what words have been included in the users search phrase, but you won’t know the exact phrase (unless you use only exact match keywords). For example, bidding on a term such as “buy green lamp” set up as a broad match, would get traffic from people who searched for phrases such as “buy a used green lamp in Columbus or Dover,” “buy green lamp,” “buy a green lamp in need of repairs,” “buy expensive tiffany green lamp” and many more. Any traffic you receive would be looking to buy some sort of green lamp. You probably do not sell all of those that your visitors want. 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. That can help justify your PPC expense for years to come.
* Create a couple landing pages at a time, in which only the headlines or headings differ. You might have a content management system or software that can alternate those. If not, allow a number of clicks (maybe 100) to land on one version, then manually change the landing page to the other version. Look at the data you gather concerning the results of the two versions according to whatever metric you are using (e.g. sales or leads). If there is a clear winner, keep it in the rotation and set up another test with a different alteration in the heading.
* Next, use the same test format as with the heading tests to vary a totally different content 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.
Make sure that on each of the content related tests you are only changing one variable. If you alter both the image and the headline at the same time, for example, you will have difficulty determining which variable is responsible for any changes in the results or what the relative impact of each is compared to the other. (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 main point to go away from this article 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. Get as much out of the funds that you are spending as possible. Test, analyze and use the data!
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