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This is the fourth post in a series on Pay-per-click advertising. Lots of our clients struggle to understand PPC so they can evaluate it as an investment, compare it to traditional advertising, figure out how it works, or sometimes just explain it to their boss. The explanations can get rather complex, so I decided to make a series of blog posts to help educate clients, readers, and anyone wanting to learn more. This is the last article in the Pay Per Click Advertising 101 series.
What You Can Learn – And What To Do With It
A well-planned and well-executed PPC campaign can achieve your advertising goals AND a positive return on your advertising investment. Data collected from your campaigns can help you answer important questions about your ad campaign, your website and your business. What we didn’t cover last time – what this post is about – is what you can DO with all these answers. Certainly you can use the information to improve your PPC ad campaign (we can do that for you). But the insights you’ll gain can also go further than that.
Critical things you can learn about your market
- What search terms are people using when they look for a product or service like what my company offers?
- Where (what websites) are people are coming from to visit my website?
- What words, designs, or ad copy get them to spend more time on my site?
- What gets them to take the actions I want them to take on my site?
- How much revenue am I generating for the cost of my PPC campaign?
How to Use What You’ve Learned
Your most effective keywords
Finding the actual words your target customers use when they’re looking to buy products or services like yours is like finding marketing gold. You may think you already know how your customers think and talk about your offerings. If you are a travel agent, for example, you might expect your customers to be looking for flights and hotels, or destination tour packages, or cheap things to do in San Francisco, or other categories of travel information. You might be correct. But there are likely other terms they are searching for that might surprise you. Once you know the best keywords for your business, here are some other ways you can use them productively:
- Website content and SEO. Focus on these keywords to optimize your website pages so you can rank higher in Organic Searches. This is the essence of Search Engine Optimization. Optimize the specific page(s) on your website you want to send a searcher to so they can take an action (buy your product, contact you, download something) when they get there.
- Link Building. Build these words into any link text that links to your website from articles you distribute, press releases, comments you make on blogs, etc. This is also an important element of SEO and will help your website to rank higher in search engine results.
- Blogging. If you have a blog, use these words liberally, choosing one or two as the focus of each blog post. This too will help your blog and/or website improve in search rankings for your target keywords.
- Email Marketing. Use these words in your email marketing campaigns, esp. in the subject line. If searchers are using the keywords when they research using a search engine, they are likely looking to take action and will be more likely to respond to an offer you send in email.
- Offline Marketing. Weave those words into the copy of your offline marketing activities, and remember that they represent how customers think of you, even if it’s not how you view your brand from inside your company.
Your best ad copy and landing pages
For the combination of ad copy and landing page that works the best at converting visitors to buyers, make note of the design elements, the call-to-action, and the content. Use it elsewhere on your website and in your other marketing vehicles.
Your best referral websites
Which websites are sending the most traffic your way – and especially the most qualified traffic, as defined by what actions people perform on your website? Identify those sites and contact them (email or phone call) and find out more about what they do, how they relate to your business, and what marketing or other goals are important to them. This could be the beginning of a mutually-beneficial relationship. Does it make sense for you to link back to their website? Are there opportunities for partnership, joint marketing, or cooperative special offers you could undertake together? Or do you just owe them a special thanks for sending traffic your way? These are important questions to investigate.
Your return on investment
Since PPC advertising can give you extensive data on the amount and quality of leads generated for your business, it offers a tremendous opportunity to more tightly and effectively manage your marketing budget. With this data in hand, you can make smarter decisions about the ad campaigns you run and about how to allocate your marketing dollars across different marketing channels.
Please let us know whether this 4-part series on PPC Advertising 101 was helpful to you. Feel free to post your questions or comments below.
