Many Internet 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 immediate sales to cover the cost of the advertising campaign. Other times they look to recoup those advertising costs over a longer period by using the PPC campaign as a means of obtaining leads that they use to develop a lasting relationship with new prospects. 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.
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.
* Using tracking data, reported by Google Analytics or your own software, identify the exact key phrases used by all of the visitors who come to your landing pages via PPC. 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. Any traffic you receive would be looking to buy some sort of green lamp. 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). If you then optimize those pages for those phrases, you can eventually get organic traffic for those searches. This effectively allows you to spread the cost of your pay-per-click campaign across many years.
* 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. You might have a content management system or software that can alternate those. 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 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.
* Conduct the same format test as with headlines, but test a different variable. You may want to test listing benefits followed by features versus having the features list come before the benefits. Alternatively, you might want to test the impact of landing pages which have two different videos of product demonstrations.
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. 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 major 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 purchase from you. Get as much out of the funds that you are spending as possible. Gather data, analyze it, and act decisively and immediately based upon the results!