BrainBeatsBucks

Many Online businesses at some point use pay-per-click (PPC) advertising as part of their overall marketing strategy.  Much of the time these advertisers hope that the increase in revenue will be at least sufficient to pay for the advertising expenses andeven create additional profit.  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.  

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.  Any traffic you receive would be looking to buy some sort of green lamp.  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.  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.  Compare the conversion results from the two versions.  If there is a clear winner, keep it in the rotation and set up another test with a different alteration in the heading.

*  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.  

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 bottom line of this article is simply that you should be using your pay-per click campaigns to be about more than selling more products or services; you should also be gathering essential data.  PPC can be expensive, so stretch those dollars to accomplish as much as possible.  Test, analyze and use the data that you wisely collect!