PPC (pay per click) advertising, the necessary evil of modern business is where you pay when someone clicks on your advertisement with the hope they will buy your product. In some ways it’s like landing a plane. They can land in the middle of a swamp or on a nice landing strip. It depends on how you prepare the location.
The cost of a PPC ad can vary greatly due to the auction process. The most important part of the process, is evaluating the relevance of the ad to the webpage you direct them to. This part is simple folks. If your ad says 20% off the first month's auto insurance and then the ad takes them to your main page with all your offering and no mention of the discount, they will be gone. Make them match.
While this may not be disastrous for a landscaper that pays $1 per click, an insurance agent that pays $30 per click it is a disaster.
Quality Score Is Very Important
Quality score measures the relevance of your online ad to your landing site. Measuring such things as whether your ad has the appropriate keywords. Are those keywords on the landing site? Does the information requested by the keyword actually exist on the page? Things like keyword density, bolding and several other factors come into play.
Another thing that comes into play is the escape rate. When you have a bad landing site and people hit the back button immediately the search engines sense this and penalize you even more. This can be from bad copy or speed issues.
If the page takes longer than 5 seconds to load you have already lost over 50% of the people who clicked on your ad. If they stay for anywhere from 5 to 30 seconds they hate the site. It may be to boring, confusing, loud or irrelevant. Any of these results and you have basically crash landed you PPC ad.
There Is Hope!
Don’t despair, you can make thing better fairly easily. If you have even $100 a month budget for a particular ad you should put a landing page on your website. A good freelancer can create your simple landing page for $50-$100. The reason to do this is because you will probably get twice as many ads for your money. On high end ads you can easily save the cost of a landing page on 1 click.
Landing pages are designed to deliver a single message and direct your visitor to 1 or 2 possible choices. There are no navigation menus or other distractions to get in the way. It has been found when given more than 2 choices, that most people will choose none.
Make the choice obvious, a big fat call to action button. Easy to see and click. Have it say Click to set appointment, or Click to buy now. Do not say click here.
Put Analytics On Your Website
If you are doing PPC advertising and you do not have analytics on your site, you have absolutely no Idea what is working and what is not. Are they leaving because the site is taking too long to load? Do they hate the page and quickly leave? Where are they going on your website? These are all things you need to know.
One great side effect of a landing page is that it is great for SEO.
Where Do You Want To Land?
So you have a PPC ad that is costing you say $500 a month, do you want it landing on a landing strip prepared to give them a safe journey to becoming your customer or landing in a swamp and hoping they make it to dry land. If you need help with PPC advertising, you can call or send me a message.