PPC (Pay-Per-Click) is probably one of the most efficient way to drive traffic to your website. However, most people fail in this area also. The most important reason is that they are not familiar with the “rules” in the PPC game. So most of the time business owners are paying high price on a low value or even irrelevant keywords and “hope” that it will get customers. That’s also why business owners comment that PPC is not a good advertising model or it is not working for them.
But they are wrong. Running PPC campaign is not a set-up and leave progress. It requires testing and optimizing. If business owners don’t test their ad, chances are they are wasting their money and get absolutely no result.
So in this article, you will discover some of the critical elements that you have to test for your PPC ads.
- Ad Headline: Your headline should be attention grabbing, and should be quickly understood by viewer. Most of the time you will find these words very useful: “free”, “new”, “sale”, or “discount”. If your headline doesn’t have these keywords, please create another ads that have these words and test if you will get more clicks, and more sales!
- Ad copy: The second thing that you should test is your ad copy. You’ll never know if changing one word will boost your click rate from 5% to 10%! It is already a proven fact that you may get a significant number of clicks and customers simply by changing one or two words of your ad. Add keywords that can attract people to click (just like those on the above) and see what happened.
- Bidding and position: Showing at the top of the result page is not always good. Chances are you can get much more response and lower cost just by being at position no.2, 3 or 4. It is because people have noticed that the top 3 “result” is usually ad and they may try to skip it. If your ad is in position 1 – 3, visitors may skip it! Change your bid and see which position gives you the best returns.
- Landing page: I strongly recommended business owner not to use their main website as PPC landing page. It is because, unlike normal website, landing page just serves one purpose: visitors who come to the landing page should decide if he/she should perform one specific action or not. For example, when people arrive to landing page, they should choose if they want to leave their name and email address, or leave the webpage. If you drive your visitors to your main website, most of the time they will be distracted by various options on your website. Landing page should only perform one thing: provide an offer to visitors in exchange of their name and email address for later communication. So it is critical to test your landing page and see what kind of changes can attract more people to leave their contact information.
So by testing frequently your ad headline, copy, bidding and landing page, you will be able to drive your PPC cost down, and get the same number, or more, people click and go to your website, and become your customers.