Regardless of how attractive and well-designed your website is, it may seem like […]
Today, many companies make use of Pay-Per-Click, i.e. PPC marketing for driving traffic to their websites. In fact, research shows that PPC marketing efforts make up around fifty percent of overall search engine marketing strategies used by companies worldwide. If you use it properly, this marketing tool can bring great results at a low cost.
PPC can be used for selling goods, services, and raising awareness about important issues. It can help you reach people who are somewhat interested in what you have to offer, and direct them to your website.
If you hire someone to craft a good PPC management solution for your campaign, you can generate traffic right away. Sometimes, PPC generates traffic within minutes from the moment a campaign starts. Unlike other forms of marketing which can take months to adjust to new trends, PPC marketing allows you to adjust your campaign within hours. This ability to follow the latest market conditions and trends can give you a great competitive advantage.
PPC marketing seems very simple – you only need to spend enough money, and you will get top placement for targeted traffic, right? Wrong. Although it is pretty straightforward, PPC demands good management skills to bring good results. While a number of factors influence the success of a PPC marketing campaign, you need to know that your website is one of the crucial ones.
Search engines allow advertisers to place their PPC ads prominently in the search engine results. However, the ad placement and price depend on various aspects. For example, Google and Bing give Quality Scores based on their examination, and use them to determine your ad’s position.
They examine the ad itself, its performance, and the quality of the page which the ad points to. A good score can help you significantly reduce costs. A bad score, on the other hand, can even knock your ad off the rankings.
Let’s assume that you’ll manage to get the position you need in the search engine results. You have a well written ad, with all the right keywords in all the right places. You start your campaign, and you expect to get your first clicks. But, where will these clicks lead the people you target?
There’s no doubt that PPC marketing can get you the traffic you need. But, if you don’t manage that traffic well, you’ll end up spending a lot of money for many useless visits without any relevant end results. You need to prepare your website to welcome new visitors and convince them to do what you expect of them.
You can maximize your website’s ability to convert visitors into customers in many ways. However, there are four essential components that you need to pay special attention to if you want your PPC marketing efforts to pay off.
The success of your PPC efforts depends largely on the pages where people land after they click your ad. If you want to motivate people to make favorable actions, you need to state and show them what exactly you want them to do. This means you should never set your PPC ad to point to your homepage, because your new visitors will most probably bounce.
Create landing pages that speak to your target audience and select a specific target for your PPC campaign. Don’t try to sell to everyone at once. If you want to reach diverse target audiences, do it with different ads and different landing pages. Be straightforward and relevant. Associate your landing pages with what your ads are saying. Give people what they want when they click your ad.
In order to be effective, your landing pages have to be clear, professional, and consistent with your brand. Be careful with the colors, text, images and calls to action. Make sure that your landing page takes your target audience exactly where you want it.
This goes for both your landing pages and the website itself. Every new visitor you gain with your PPC campaign can easily vanish if you are wasting their time. People use the internet to speed up the process of getting what they need. Have this in mind when you craft your conversion process.
Make things simple from the start to the very end of the selling funnel. Do not ask for more information than necessary for people to convert. Try to squeeze all your questions in one page. Otherwise, add a progress bar so people will know where they are in the funnel.
Give your customers the option to register through their social media profiles. Put your terms and privacy policies on separate links so people can choose what they want to read. Make your forms intuitive and enable the auto-fill option.
Your entire website needs to be optimized to work flawlessly on all the major browsers, operating systems and devices. There should be no errors while displaying content, graphics or interactive media.
Your site has to load quickly, or your traffic will go to waste. Compress and optimize your content so it won’t slow down the website’s loading time. Never put your videos on auto-play, since it can significantly slow down the page.
Optimize your website for mobile devices. Otherwise, you risk losing a huge part of your target audience. Today, a majority of people are browsing and searching the net through their smartphones and tablets. They make purchasing decisions on the go. So, let them find you easily at any time.
What’s the use of investing in marketing if you can’t measure and analyze the results? This applies especially to PPC marketing. Why waste your money if you don’t attract the right audience? And what good is there in attracting your targets to your website if they are not converting?
If you want your PPC campaign to run smoothly and bring you the benefits you expect, provide tools for reliable tracking. In order to be able to measure the ROI of your campaign, you will need to track both traffic and conversions.
Take the opportunity to collect as much data as you can. It will give you a clear perspective of the PPC marketing campaign and its effects. It will show you if you do everything well. You’ll be able to increase the effectiveness of current and future PPC campaigns based on reliable data. Do not settle with average results. Do your best to get the most out of what PPC marketing has to offer.
