For any business looking to dive into internet marketing PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising can land you on the first page of Google and get your website in front of people who are searching for keywords directly related to your business! Quite simply it’s the quickest way to drive traffic to your website without making a time investment like you would with SEO (search engine optimization). But getting in the game is one thing, making your investment payoff is another. One way to ensure this is to optimize your PPC landing pages.
PPC is by far and away the best bang for your buck when it comes to any type of advertising period. Not only can you deliver your message to a primed audience, but you also have an entire suite of tools to measure and track your campaigns. This means there are no grey areas of “did that newspaper ad work?” or “I wonder if that radio ad drove traffic to my website?” With PPC it’s all there, you’re in full control to ramp up spend when something’s working and cut the strings when it’s not.
PPC for SMBs (Small to Mid-Size Business) differs a lot from many of the PPC ads you’re used to seeing. With PPC for SMBs your keywords are likely going to be very focused; because you do one thing and do it well. If you’re totally new to internet marketing and your business is primarily brick and mortar…
How Do You Track Your PPC ROI (return on investment)?
- Drive people to your lead forms (see “setting up your conversions” for how to track these).
- Try putting a trackable phone number in your ad i.e. different from your regular phone number, this way you’ll know how many people called you as a result of your PPC ads. You can also track click to call functionality if you have that on your site.
- Offer printable coupons unique to your PPC campaign and keep track of when they’re redeemed.
- Encourage People to sign up for your newsletter.
- Set goals and objectives in GA (Google Analytics) to set benchmarks for success of your active campaigns.
- Use annotations in GA to mark start dates of your campaigns and subsequent changes you end up making.
- Keep a record of the bounce rate of your pages, if it’s too high you may need to make the page more relevant to your keywords.
- Pay close attention to all the KPIs (key performance indicators) in Google AdWords: CTR (click through rate), CPC (cost per click), click to conversion, and the biggest one: cost per conversion.
Setting Up Your Conversions
So many small businesses fail to implement proper conversions for their PPC campaigns. Many simply choose their keywords, write their ad copy and let the campaign drive traffic to their site (hopefully). Sure, you’ll be able to see the increase in visitors, but how will you know that who filled out your lead form, or bought a product as a result of your PPC ad campaigns.
This is where conversion code becomes very powerful. Conversion code is a little snippet of code (provided by Google) which you paste into your thank you page (or any other page that you want to drive people to). Now every time someone clicks on your ads and follows through to your thank you page it’s recorded as a conversion. This gives you a crystal clear picture of how many people are actually converting as a result of your PPC campaign.
See What PPC Can Do For You
You can get started with PPC by using this $75 free Google advertising coupon, but if you find that you’re spending your budget too quickly or in the wrong areas a TechWyse PPC expert may be able to help you.