Most marketers on the Internet use PPC (pay-per-click) at some point within their broader marketing mix. Sometimes they use it so effectively that they make enough in immediate sales to cover the cost of the advertising campaign. Some other businesses use these advertising campaigns with the primary objective of building their list of leads so that they may gradually build a relationship with the prospects that will eventually create some of them into customers. Still other times, the focus of some Internet marketers during a PPC campaign includes using the data that they collect for research and planning purposes.
It is this last approach to pay-per-click that I want to address in this article. Here are a few very useful tests that you can incorporate into your next PPC campaign. I am already assuming that you have performed superb keyword research.
* 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. If you set up your advertising campaign so that each ad group (group of related keywords) delivers traffic to a separate landing page, you will know only what words have been included in the users search phrase, but you won’t know the exact phrase (unless you use only exact match keywords). For example, bidding on a term such as “buy green lamp” set up as a broad match, would get traffic from people who searched for phrases such as “buy a used green lamp in Columbus or Dover,” “buy green lamp,” “buy a green lamp in need of repairs,” “buy expensive tiffany green lamp” and many more. Clearly those visitors are looking for very different sorts of green lamps to buy. Based upon the search phrases that your discover and the number of people you identify using them, you may want to create new permanent pages for your site stressing those phrases. If you then optimize those pages for those phrases, you can eventually get organic traffic for those searches. That can help justify your PPC expense for years to come.
* Create a couple landing pages at a time, in which only the headlines or headings differ. 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. Compare the conversion results from the two versions. If one version clearly out performs the other, then keep that version and begin to test it against another altered headline. Keep doing that until you are sure that you have come up with the world’s best possible headline for that page.
* 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. Or you could test one page with an image and another that has a short video display.
Make sure that on each of the content related tests you are only changing one variable. If you alter both the image and the headline at the same time, for example, you will have difficulty determining which variable is responsible for any changes in the results or what the relative impact of each is compared to the other. (Actually, if you have some statistical sophistication, you can set up a test in which you change multiple variables at once across multiple versions of the landing page.)
The main point to take away from this is that you should be using your PPC campaigns to do considerably more than bring visitors to your site and hope that they will buy something. Get as much out of the money that you are spending as possible. Test, analyze and use the data!
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