Most marketers on the web use PPC (pay-per-click) eventually within their marketing mix. Much of the time these businesses hope that the increase in revenue will be at least sufficient to cover the advertising and, perhaps, even bring in additional profit. Other times they look to recover those expenses 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. Other marketers focus their PPC campaigns upon gathering research and planning data that will reap benefits for years to come. Of course, none of these objectives need exclude the other possibilities.
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. Obviously, if you set up your campaign properly, you know which of the phrases that you bid on are bringing the visitors, however, unless you are using only exact match phrases, that does not alert you to the precise search terms entered by your traffic. As a simple, if lengthy, example, let’s say that you bid on a broad match phrase such as, “lamp green buy.” (Of course, you would have the quotation marks around those words, if it is a broad match.) You could have individual visitors who searched for “buy expensive tiffany lamp,” “buy a used green lamp in Atlanta or Marietta,” buy a green or yellow ceramic lamp” and other phrases. Clearly those visitors are looking for very different sorts of green lamps to buy. You probably do not sell all of those that your visitors want. You may want to create pages for the key phrases that are applicable (and which seem to be giving you enough traffic to justify the relatively minimal effort). 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.
* Test your headings (headlines) on your PPC landing pages. Set up two pages for the same ad group. The pages should be identical in every other way except for the heading. It’s possible to set up some content management systems to do this or buy inexpensive software to alternate the pages for you. It’s also very easy to simply change the landing page to the different version within your ad after you have received a sufficient number of clicks to provide your with useful data—at least 100 clicks. 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. For example, you may want to test two different product images against each other. Alternatively, you might want to test the impact of landing pages which have two different videos of product demonstrations.
Make sure that on each of the content related tests you are only changing one variable. Do not change both the headline and the image at the same time, or it will be difficult for you to determine which variable it is that makes the difference in your conversion results or the relative impact of each. Of course, if you have experience with multi-variant analysis, you may choose to alter more than one variable at any given time. Most people, however, do not have that level of statistical sophistication.,
The main point to take away from this 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. PPC can be expensive, so maximize your benefits from those dollars to accomplish as much as you possibly can. Test, analyze and use the data!
