Many Online marketers at some point use pay-per-click (PPC) advertising as part of their overall marketing strategy. Sometimes they use it so successfully that they make enough in resulting 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. 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.
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. 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. 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. This effectively allows you to spread the cost of your pay-per-click campaign across many years.
* Create a couple landing pages at a time, in which only the headlines or headings differ. You might have a content management system or software that can alternate those. If not, allow a number of clicks (maybe 100) to land on one version, then manually change the landing page to the other version. 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. You may want to test listing benefits followed by features versus having the features list come before the benefits. Or you could test one page with an image and another that has a short video display.
As you perform the tests on the content of your landing pages, be certain that you do not change more than one variable at a time. 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. 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 go 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 you can. Gather data, analyze it, and act decisively based upon the results!
