PPC or Pay-Per-Click marketing is one of the most common online marketing strategies used today. It’s a great way to get traffic to your website. PPC is easy to understand. You need to bid on particular keywords, create ads for those keywords and pay the bidding amount every time a prospect clicks on the ads. PPC can place the name of your business or product right at the top of a search engine results page. No amount of SEO will place you as high as PPC can.
However, small business owners often find that it’s hard to see good ROI with this strategy. This is because they don’t understand PPC goes beyond just setting up ads and using keywords. Here is what you need to pay attention to:
Bad or Missing Landing Pages
Your PPC ad will lead a prospective customer directly to the landing page. You will have won a portion of the battle when the prospect clicked on the ad, but the landing page is your first volley. It needs to grab the attention of everyone who clicks on the link. If your landing page design isn’t good or if you don’t have a landing page at all, it will be difficult converting your prospects.
These pages give the prospects all the information they need. They can look at the product or service that you advertised, get your contact information, and also get your pricing details. If there’s no attractive landing page with all information clearly presented, the prospects might turn to look elsewhere.
Wrong Landing Pages
If you click on an ad that showcases a pair of boots and are directed towards a landing page that shows a pair of heels, you’re not going to bother looking for the boots. The misleading link would most likely irritate you. It can also harm your reputation if the PPC ad links to pages that aren’t related to the keyword at all.
For example, if the keyword you targeted is ‘brown leather wallet’ and the prospect was instead directed to a gambling website, your reputation would suffer. Google might even penalize you for it. That’s why it is absolutely necessary to ensure that your PPC ads lead directly to the places they’re supposed to. Misleading prospective customers is the last thing you want to do.
Class Tracking
Whatever the online evangelists may say, conversions don’t just happen through the internet. There are many customers who will call you after seeing your ads on the SERPs. If you don’t track those calls, you’ll miss out on some important leads and data. People who pick up the phone are more invested in buying the product than people who interact with you online.
You need to understand which ads and keywords attracts the callers. The only way to do that is by actively tracking calls and comparing the data to your Analytics data and CTR (Click Through Rate). This will help you optimize your PPC campaign for the future as well. After all, if you don’t plan well, you PPC ads won’t deliver the results that you want.
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