We do a fair bit of Adwords and PPC for clients and we still see a few of the same issues appear when we first take on existing accounts that aren’t working as well as they could be.
So here are a few ideas to help boost the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns.
Take time building a keyword list
It is easy to go to Google Adwords and set up a campaign in 5 minutes flat. But if you do not research your keywords properly, you could be leaving a ton of money on the table or you could be keeping your average costs per click rates high. Use services such as Wordtracker or the Google Keyword Tool; look at your competitors websites using SEMrush; and look at your own web server logs or Google Webmaster Tools to see what people are typing in to find you.
Build dedicated landing pages
This is a shocker! Lots of companies build multiple PPC campaigns and drive the traffic to either their homepage or a product page. This can cause the user great confusion as they are presented with a ton of options when then hit your site and they may not even find what they were looking for. On this basis you are paying for people to get lost on your site!
My advice is to build dedicated keyword landing pages or at the very least a landing page for each campaign you run. Each landing page should do one of two things only. Get an email address or contact details; or to make a sale in the case of an e-commerce site. That’s it!
Strip out the main site navigation, remove the phone numbers (how will you track the true effectiveness of the campaign?) and make it easy for the visitor to do what you want.
Time schedule your ads
If you are collecting a filled in form to get back to the customer the same day, why have your ads running when your office is closed? That just wastes everyone’s time and your money.
Look to add negative keywords
They are words that you can add to make sure you do not appear for. This could be something that would appear in combination with your own keywords. The big ones are words like “free” or “guaranteed” or even brand names.
