Pay-per-click Internet advertising (PPC) can be fast, efficient, and effective. Unfortunately, a lot of business owners and executives never realize this, usually because they don’t know about the benefits, have tried to manage PPC campaigns themselves without much success, or (worst of all) have had bad experiences with an untrustworthy vendor.
If you fall into any of those categories, we don’t want you to swear off Google AdWords and other profitable PPC channels for the wrong reasons. Targeted online ads do work, and work well, but only when certain ingredients and safeguards are in place.
To give you a sense of why that’s so important, today we want to share the three factors that make or break PPC advertising campaigns…
#1 The Right Audience and Keyword Strategy
Pay-per-click advertising only works if you attract the right kinds of visitors to your website. Otherwise, you are paying for clicks that are never going to turn into leads or sales, which is incredibly wasteful. To maximize the value of every visit, you have to target buyers carefully with an optimized keyword strategy that doesn’t just identify good leads, but also keeps the wrong kinds of visitors from clicking on your ads and costing you money. Remember that the best keywords aren’t the ones with the most traffic, but the ones that bring you the highest return (the cost-per-click versus your closing ratio).
#2 Correct Account Setup
A lot of pay-per-click campaigns fail simply because they haven’t been set up correctly. Strange as it might sound, many business owners – and more than a few PPC “experts” – will neglect important details like location, language, device preferences, and even time or budget settings. This isn’t just important on Google, but also when advertising on Facebook. That’s because selecting the right demographics is crucial to attracting profitable clicks. No matter what platform you’re using, you simply can’t have a winning campaign without the right account settings in place.
#3 Ongoing PPC Maintenance and Optimization
Very few PPC campaigns start out being as profitable as they could be. Instead, there is a continual process of evaluation and experimentation that improves click through rates and conversions from one month to the next. If your campaigns aren’t getting that kind of treatment, and improvement, then they are never going to be as effective as they could be… and in fact, they might not become profitable at all. Don’t settle for having a good PPC plan in place. Insist on getting your ads off to a good start, and then having a professional keep refining them until they deliver the right results again and again.
When pay-per-click ads are setup and functioning correctly, they bring you an instant stream of targeted prospects who would be almost impossible to reach otherwise. But, without the right professional management, it’s easy for PPC to become expensive and time-consuming.
So, if you’re serious about making Internet advertising a part of your business strategy – and seeing how you can use it to grow your bottom line – contact our team today and see how we can help.