pixelpunk blog » pay-per-click

Clever+Funny=Woot

pixelpunk — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 14:34:56 +0000

This PPC ad from Woot.com is great. I laughed. I clicked. I became an instant fan. It also got me thinking that I should be testing humor in my own pay-per-click campaigns! Thanks for the marketing tip, Woot.

Pella Windows & Doors is Throwing Money Out the Proverbial “Window”

pixelpunk — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 23:43:58 +0000

Pella Windows needs a new advertising agency, pronto.

I’m in the market for a few (five, actually), quality, pre-hung windows—so of course I fired up my old friend Google and did a search on “pre-hung window”. Most of the search results were for tips on how to install your own windows…but I wanted to BUY windows, not install them.

Pella Windows has a great reputation and their Google AdWords ad was the ONLY relevant result on the entire page. That’s an Internet Marketers wet dream—a buyer who is deep into the “buying cycle”, ready to make a purchase, ready to pull the trigger, and Pella was the only (in my opinion) obvious choice. Done deal, right?

Wrong.

This buyer was swiftly and obediently delivered to an error page. Pella not only lost the sale, but they spent good money accomplishing it. They were still charged for the click, but had absolutely no way of realizing a return on their ad spend. And I’m just ONE buyer. Consider how how much money Pella is literally throwing out the window every day on this worthless (and presumably, expensive) campaign.

The shame isn’t that they wasted a $2.30 click. It’s that they lost a $1000.00 deal. That would have been a pretty good ROI on a sub-three dollar marketing investment.

The point is this: Pay-per-click marketing isn’t a “set-it-and-forget-it” game. It has to be monitored daily, and conversions have to be measured. Every marketing dollar needs to be accounted for. If your agency or consultant isn’t doing this, fire them.

Trick To Click Strategies

pixelpunk — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 12:04:58 +0000

This isn’t PPC, it’s TTC. Trick to Click. It is a policy of Google not to allow AdWords ads that mimic computer functions or confuse or otherwise trick the user into clicking an ad that they normally wouldn’t have an interest in. This ad by reunion.com sure seems to fall into that category. I wonder how many thousands of hours in lost productivity (in aggregate) were realized after users accidentally clicked this one? This is bad for Reunion.com, bad for the user, and ultimately bad for Google if users stop trusting (and clicking on) their ads.

Edit: I took this screen grab a while back and can’t reproduce the ad. Looks like Google is doing a good job at weeding out bad ads.

Use Dedicated Landing Pages For PPC Campaigns

pixelpunk — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 19:01:37 +0000

The beauty of PPC is that it brings focused, targeted traffic to your Web site with measurable results and superfast marketing feedback loops. You can account for every dime spent. It’s a beautiful thing.

Yet many advertisers simply direct ad clicks to their generic homepage rather than to a page created specifically for the user who just clicked the ad. I have read industry reports that state that up to 40% of PPC ads are still pointing to generic, unfocused landing pages. If you use dedicated landing pages for each of your campaigns among the different PPC vendors, it will be very easy to measure and track ROI for each ad. Why settle for an industry-average 2-4% conversion rate when the right landing page can literally quadruple (or more in most cases) the number of conversions?

Another reason to use dedicated landing pages: It simply makes life easier for your visitor! Think about it…they have already read and clicked your ad, so they know exactly what they are looking for and what they expect to see after they click the link. If you dump the user on a generic home page that doesn’t specifically address their query, they will have to start their search all over again within your own site!

Using Pay-Per-Click to Drive Organic Search Strategies

pixelpunk — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:11:27 +0000

Before you spend a lot of time and money optimizing your website for keywords that you think users may be searching for, run a pay-per-click campaign and study the data. Start with Google’s AdWords program. Google has the best tools and the largest reach.

For example, I have a client who wanted to be ranked in the natural search results for a few dozen highly competitive terms. By running a PPC campaign for a couple of months (with thousands of potential keywords), we discovered that, while those original keywords did drive traffic to the site, those visitors did not convert to customers. They were ‘researchers’, and ‘browsers’, but they weren’t ready to buy.

Through our testing, however, we discovered hundreds of keywords that did convert visitors into customers. We immediately changed our focus to target those terms instead. The small investment for PPC testing was returned to us 10-fold within two months and the site is now ranking in the natural search results for those high-converting keywords.

I can think of no other advertising medium where you can do this sort of real-time testing in a real marketplace and receive feedback almost immediately. It’s priceless.

12 Ways To Improve Your Pay-Per-Click Campaigns

pixelpunk — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 00:49:12 +0000

Become your customer. Figure out what you have that they want and then put yourself in their shoes. What words will they use while using a search engine to find what you have to offer? What are the exact words? That’s what you need to figure out. Get inside the head of your audience and do exactly what they would do. And then create compelling ad copy (that speaks directly to these people) so that they click on your ad. Simple, right?
Check out the competition. Do a search on one of your keywords and look at who is competing for those keywords. Are there 10 competitors? Or 100? This will give you an approximate indication of how hard you have to work and how much you will have to pay. Take a look at their ad copy and check out their landing pages (do they even have landing pages?). What are they doing right? Which ones clearly don’t get it and are just throwing money away? Is someone obviously executing a branding campaign and doesn’t care what they pay? Who is on top this week? What about next week? Study the way ad positions move around and you’ll figure out how relevant the search engines think the ad is, whether the competitor is actively editing their ad copy to make it more relevant, or if the dumbass is just throwing more money at a bad campaign. Learn from their mistakes, and profit from what they have already spent time learning. No need to reinvent the wheel.
Create lots of AdGroups. Don’t make the mistake of creating one single ad that attempts to cover all 400+ of your keywords. Each cluster of closely related keywords should have it’s own ad with it’s own unique ad copy. Generally, the closer your ad copy matches your keywords, the higher your click-through rate will be and the better your quality score will be. You want targeted customers, right? Well then, target each ad group to a particular customer.
Put your keywords in the title of your ad. Google will bold
the keywords in an ad and that will draw more attention to them. It makes the ad look more relevant to the user and they will be more likely to click on it (since those are the keywords they just
typed and that is exactly what they are looking for!). The closer the ad looks to the exact phrase the user just typed in the better (which explains why you need to have many ad groups, right?).
Develop a negative keyword list. I’ve seen click-through (and sometimes conversion rates) double when the appropriate negative keyword list was added. For example, if you are selling content management software and you are bidding on the keyword, ‘content management software’, you want to add the word “-free” as a negative keyword for obvious reasons. People looking for free stuff generally aren’t very good leads (unless you are a web 2.0 company >>grin<< ).
Make your display URL look relevant. Using the example above, I would make the display URL look like this: www.mysite.com/CRM_software/. This could give a user the impression that your ad might me more relevant than your competitors. As a result, you may enjoy a higher click-through rate and better conversions.
Talk about the benefits in your ad copy, not just the features How are you going to solve their problem? Tell them! Many products and services solve exactly the same problem and have exactly the same feature set. Why tell them about the features when your competitors are doing exactly the same thing? What makes you different? Tell them how you are going to solve their problem and they will be more likely to identify and click through to learn more (and more likely to become customers).
Pre-qualify Clicks. You don’t want people clicking on your ad who have absolutely no intention of making a purchase or that will ultimately have no
real interest in your offer. In other words, write your ad copy with the intention of converting these users to actual customers (and not just so he/she clicks the ad). Make that your goal. Every time a user clicks, it costs you money. You need to make sure that those clicks count. For example, if your services start at $1800, mention it in your ad copy. That way, the cheapskates who aren’t willing to spend that kind of money will skip your ad altogether. If you sell an expensive widget, say, “Blue Widgets starting at $79.99”. With any luck, someone who is not willing to spend $79.99 won’t click your ad (you hope).
Measure. Measure. Measure. Don’t just set it and forget it. Track your impressions and track the keywords that get a high click-through rate (but are not converting into customers). And then figure out why they are not converting. Use the conversion tracking code that the major PPC engines provide to determine what your ROI is. For example: I have a client that I started a PPC campaign for 30 days ago…today he told me that one (1) customer just paid for the whole program (music to my ears!). You simply cannot measure the success of a campaign until you understand your ROI and determine what a customer or lead is actually worth. Get creative with measuring results. How many people may have clicked on an ad but chose to pick up the phone to place an order instead of through your website? Have you considered a unique 1-800 number just for your website to track these types of conversions? Perhaps your
sales are complex (e.g. are expensive or take many people to approve the purchase) and take longer than the normal 30-day PPC cookie that is stored on their computer. Do you have a plan for accounting for those sales? You need to. Now!
Test, and then test again. With A/B split testing (among other types (Google Optimizer, for example.)), you can test ad copy (and layouts) to figure out which ads are performing the best. Delete the loser ad and try to create even better and even more compelling
ad. Test it again, delete the loser again, then start the process all over. The idea here is to refine your message until you get the highest possible return on your advertising investment. Rinse, repeat, until
you get it right.
Use unique landing pages for each of your ads. Each ad will have a slightly different message (targeted to slightly different customers, using slightly different keywords), so why drop them to your generic homepage? There are very few instances where taking a prospective customer to the homepage makes any sense. Take the user to exactly where they want to go (as dictated by your ad copy). You already know what they are looking for…give them what they want!
BTW: Split test your landing pages as well (See #10…same idea).
Take a cold, hard, critical look at your own website. The tips above can drive low cost, highly targeted traffic to your site, but if your site doesn’t do a good job at converting that traffic into customers, you lose. Is your site well designed? Does it instill trust and confidence? Can users find what they are looking for and easily make a purchase or an inquiry? What’s the sales process like? Look at your weblogs and figure out what people are doing once they get to your site. Discover what is broken, and then fix it. Think about usability, think about the confidence the user need to feel when making a credit card purchase, and think about the sales funnel. Would you trust your own site with your personal information? Do you have a VeriSign logo? A privacy policy? A no-hassle money back guarantee statement? Why not?