Pay-per-click is not something you deal with lightly, primarily because it costs you money with every click. If your PPC efforts do not convert, you are basically spending on something that does not generate any returns. How do you ensure that your pay-per-click ads do give you the kind of revenues that make them worth your while?
While there is really no surefire way to guarantee that all the clicks that lead to your site from your ads will generate some income, you can do a number of things to help increase the possibility of making money from your ads. To help you with these, here are some tips that a few PPC experts swear by:
- Make sure to keep track of what you do right from the start – keeping track of every single thing you do, as well as what happens with what you are doing, will help you in the long run. You will be able to see which ads are not effective, which keywords are not bringing in traffic that converts, and which campaigns are money drains. You will need to use conversion tracking to find out whether or not you are indeed making money from your ads, as well as from which ads and keywords your revenues come from. This way, you can tweak your ads to be more effective as you analyze these week by week, and month by month.
- Use geo targeting to avoid wasteful ad appearances – if your company is not selling to people in specific cities or states, it might be a good idea for you to use geographic targeting to limit where your ads appear. This way, you will be able to lower your ad spend considerably since you won’t have to worry about people clicking on your PPC ads from a location that you do not service. Aside from this, you can also create ads that target specific markets in the places that you are selling to. You can create location specific ads for these areas by using micro-geographic targeting.
- Test your ads to find which ones work best – this is a strategy that a lot of companies use, not just for their PPC efforts but also for their products as well. To find out which ad generates more clicks, and which one makes more money for you, create two ads for each campaign. This is called split testing. Set it up in such a way that both ads will show randomly to people searching for specific keywords, and track the performance of each ad over a set period of time. Once you determine which ad works best, keep that one and junk the other.
- Optimize your website and your landing pages – make sure that the page your ad lands on after a person clicks through is relevant to the ad itself. If you have an ad that has a very high clickthrough rate but brings a person to a page that is either lackluster or does not give them what the ad promises, you are wasting money on the ad. You need to optimize your landing pages, as well as your web pages, to give your clientele the kind of page and website they expect to find when they click your ad.
