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Pay Per Click: Is There Really A Secret Formula?
I've been helping clients manage pay per click campaigns for a few years now and the questions I'm most often asked is how to keep the cost under control while still getting sufficient clicks coming through.
The fact is services such as Google Adwords have made it literally child's play to set-up, start a campaign and get it going. The problem is getting campaigns to run efficiently at an effective cost per click (CPC) is much more difficult.
So is there a secret formula that the experts are using to enable them to overcome these issues? I don't think there is as such, it is more about applying common sense, best practice principles and keeping at it until things start to work.
The mistake people most often make is to keep raising their cost per click (CPC) and daily limit to try and get a reasonable number of clicks coming through. It usually achieves the desired results but the cost can easily rise to levels that are uneconomic.
What I've found to be more effective is to focus on designing an ad that people will want to click on. This can be achieved with a free giveaway or some other incentive. The aim is to get the click through rate (CTR) up to between 3 - 5 per cent. I have found that by doing this, over time the CPC will actually go down because Google seems to reward campaigns with good CTR's.
The other thing that can help with this is to have two very similar ads running at the some time. Google will never display the ads together and basically the idea is to try and play the two ads against each other. Make a few tweaks to one of them wait a few days and then see which has the highest CTR. Discard the other one, replacing it with a copy of the good one and make a few more small tweaks and so on.
Keywords and keyword phrases always seem to be difficult for people to get right. Generally I use a combination of the keyword tool in Adwords, Google Suggest and the Overture Suggest tool, to come up with suitable keywords and keyword phrases.
I've found the simplest way is to chuck all the words into the campaign and over time delete the ones that are not working.
And don't forget to take Google's advice on the keyword matching options. This mean splitting them up into broad match, phrase match and exact match. I've found that by doing this you can easily more than double the clicks coming through.
The trick is the have plenty of ad groups running in each campaign. The reason for this is you can target different keywords and keyword phrases with each ad and thus achieve even higher CTR.
Listed above are some simple techniques I've used to good effect. Still to come are developing an effective landing page and getting the visitors to convert into something useful, but I'll leave that to another day!
About The Author
David Howlett is a web adviser and trainer based in the UK. He is currently working on a complete web-marketing course for businesses.http://www.davidhowlett.co.uk
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