Pay per click (PPC) can be a tricky thing but, if done right, and combined with your current SEO marketing efforts, can drive some serious and immediate traffic for you. The critics and the nay sayers will tell you not to waste your time and money on PPC but, for most of them, they have had no success because there are certain strategies they continue to ignore. For those that really understand the strategies that can make PPC so successful, combining it with their ongoing SEO can give their business a quick and serious shot of traffic and conversions. So, if you want to put the “pay” in pay per click, you must avoid these strategic blunders.
- The first major blunder is that most companies don’t understand who their target audience is. You must do some serious keyword research that will strategically attract that audience you are looking for. Also, those that are failing in their PPC efforts are not properly targeting and they also have no overall plan or goal in mind. You must properly target devices and locations and your goals must be clear with regard to what you want to accomplish. Are you looking to drive traffic? Develop hot leads? Give your branding a boost?
- Other major mistakes include having no calls to action and having traffic land on your home page. Even if you are just doing some branding, you must force them to take action. Sending them to your home page is a waste of everyone’s time. You must be sending them to a specific landing page with calls to action that will lead them all the way to the conversion.
- Finally, most PPC campaigns fail because there is no constant testing and measurement going on during the campaign. The only way to truly see how your ads are doing is to test them. A/B testing is important so that you can see what works and what doesn’t. There are plenty of data gathering and analytical tools out there to use so use them. Testing and measuring will allow you to go forward with what as been working for you.
-Written by Kevin Sawyer
