Affiliate Reviews Blog

Most marketers on the web use PPC (pay-per-click) at some point within their broader marketing mix.  Sometimes they use it so successfully that they make enough in resulting sales to cover the cost of the advertising.  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.  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.  

I am writing this article to draw your attention to using pay-per-click as a research tool, although you should feel free to make a profit at the same time  (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.  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).  As a simple, if lengthy, example, let’s say that you bid on a broad match phrase such as, “lamp green buy.”  (Of course, you would have the quotation marks around those words, if it is a broad match.)  You could have individual visitors who searched for “buy expensive tiffany lamp,” “buy a used green lamp in Atlanta or Marietta,” buy a green or yellow ceramic lamp” and other phrases.  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.  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.  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.  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.  For example, you may want to test two different product images against each other.  Or you could test one page with an image and another that has a short video display.  

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.  (Actually, if you have some statistical sophistication, you can set up a test in which you change multiple variables at once across multiple versions of the landing page.)

The major point to take away from this article is that you should be using your PPC campaigns to do more than bring visitors to your site and hope that they will buy something.  PPC can be expensive, so stretch those dollars to accomplish as much as possible.  Gather data, analyze it, and act decisively based upon your findings!