Pay Per Click – How to Boost Conversions

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Pay Per Click – How to Boost Conversions

15 July 2009 and last modified on May 17th, 2010 at 9:15 pm, One Comment

Pay Per Click adversing provides an effective opportunity for companies and websites to target new customers via the Internet. In site of its benefits, Pay per click advertising can prove expensive for a company if the campaign is not managed properly.

Pay per click advertising is essential for companies that are either new or do not have an established organic website presence. A high rank for your company’s website on organic listings on search engines can take time and effort to achieve. Achieving a first page rank on leading search engines like Google can take up to a year to achieve. In the short term, Pay per click can prove profitable and deliver the required results.

In spite of its benefits, many websites and businesses that have used Pay per click advertising such as Google Adwords, have failed to realise the benefits. Rising costs and poor management of campaigns are some of the main factors responsible for failure of most Pay per click campaigns.

The following tips can help a company to improve pay per click conversions and the campaign profitable.

1.Try Keyword Variations and attributes

Selection of the right keywords is essential to the success of any Internet marketing campaign. Pay per click campaigns allows the advertiser to select keywords based on a number of matching criteria. It is possible to select keywords on a broad match, exact phrase match or even negative matches.

Using a broad match for your selected keywords may result in your ads appearing on a wide range of keyword variations; however it can lower the conversion rates as your ads may also appear in searches that are not very relevant. Similarly selecting keywords based on exact matches may result in your ads appearing in highly relevant searches; however it may also lead to missed opportunities. Negative match keywords on the other hand can help by ensuring your site is not returned for certain keywords. It can thus help filter out ads being returned in searches that are not relevant to your website at all is spite of your keyword being present in the search phrase. An example will be if your website offers information and reviews on technology gadgets, you may want your ad returned when someone searched for ˜Gadgets” but not for ˜Buy Gadgets”.

2.Research Competitors’ Ads

It is quite easy to research what your competitors are using. You can perform a search for your desired keywords on search engines like Google or Yahoo and easily find out how your competitors are advertising. The ad text plays a key role to determine click through. The ad text you use on you PPC advertisements will probably play the most important role in conversions.

3.Focus on Low-Cost Keywords

The increasing cost of keywords is one of the main concerns faced by companies that us pay pr click advertising .Due to increased competition, the average cost of keywords has increased manifold in recent years. Today a competitive keyword can cost over £1 for a single click. Some keywords can cost much more. When selecting your keywords, you should try and keep the average cost to a minimum. This is specially the case of your profit margin per sale is low.

4. Avoid keywords that are very competitive

When researching keywords for your ads, you should try and choose keywords with less competition. Most keyword selection tools, including Google Adwords keyword suggestion tool, provide users with ability to research average search volumes and competition for any keyword phrase. Whilst it may seem obvious to select keywords that have a higher search volume, it is also important to select those with less completion. This will reduce your average per click cost. Using the right keyword tools, it can be sometimes possible to select profitable keywords with comparatively less competition.

5. Use the right message in your ads

As discussed earlier, the message on your ads will be a key factor in determining conversion rates. A high conversion rate is important to maximise the benefits of the PPC campaign. Certain words like save, discount, free and promo tend to attract customer’s attention more than other words. It is important to use the right words in your ad text. Studying what your competitors are using can provide you with a useful insight into what can work for your business.

6. Use an appropriate Landing Page

Landing page is the page that a user will visit when they click your ad. Quite often businesses make the mistake of linking all their ads to the homepage of her company’s website. You should only do so if your homepage is directly related to your ad. In most cases successful ad campaigns use specially designed landing pages that are created specifically to target customers coming from the respective advertisements. Alternatively you can use a relevant inner page of your website as the landing page.

In either case the landing page you decide t o use should be highly related to the ad that is clicked to the get to the page. This is essential to get the maximum results and to ensure visitors are directed to the correct page. If you are running multiple ads that target different services, it is important that the ads link to the correct landing pages, and that all ads do not simply link to one page on your website.

It is a good idea to have targeted landing pages specifically designed for each PPC campaign. It is also very important that the landing page has a relevant call to action statement. The end goal of the campaign should be to encourage the user to perform an action, whether it is a purchase, enquiry or registration on your website. This will increase your chances of converting leads into sales, commonly known as the conversion rate.

7. Measure the Performance of Your Ads

Pay per Click campaigns often require to be fine tuned before they are effective. Internet advertising is all about trying different approaches and seeing what works best for your company. Pay per click is no different. A majority of the pay per click campaigns fail because the company has not been able to review and monitor the performance of the ad campaigns over time. It is essential to analyse each campaign to see what is succeeding and what is not. Once you have studied this information, you will be able to fix the ads that are nit performing well. Similarly ads that run well will provide you with information on what works for your website.

This may seem obvious, however it is quite often n neglected. Internet marketing experts encourage reviewing your pay per click campaign on a daily basis.

8. Refine Your Ads and Focus on ads that perform well

Monitoring your campaign and talking necessary action is essential for the success of any Pay per click campaign. When starting a campaign, it is advised to run a few different versions of the ad. You can set the ads to rotate. After your pay per click campaign has been running for a week or two, you should study the results to see which ads are performing best.

All pay per click campaigns including Google Adwords and Yahoo YPN offer detailed reporting section. Using the reports feature you can easily analyse the performance of different ad versions. You should analyse the reports frequently and refine your ads accordingly. Not being able to do so is one of the biggest causes of failure of a campaign.

This article was written with input from the London based Web Design Company, Kronik Media.

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