Tighten up your PPC strategy

Many small businesses love Google’s self-serve Adwords programme. Just sign up, create an ad, choose some keywords or let Google choose them for you, get traffic, pay the invoice.

Not so fast!
That’s all nice and simple but there are a few things you could be doing to make sure you’re getting the maximum juice from the squeeze.

Google is your friend. Sort of.
Google wants you to get some traffic, Google even provide you with tools to measure that traffic optimally. They even push you to do the most you can with the traffic you’re paying for, but the last thing Google are going to do is voluntarily reduce the amount of revenue they make.

It’s all about the conversions
If you’re not paying attention to the conversions (whether that is orders or leads) that you get from your Adwords spend, you need to, right now. You can track things internally if you like – assuming your content management system’s lead forms or your e-commerce platform show you all the ways someone got to your site (for extra credit, not just last-click tracking too). If that’s not possible, Adwords provides conversion tracking for you. You set up a conversion, add a bit of javascript to the conversion page (final page of checkout or contact form sent page) and you’re done. Conversions will be tracked right down to the campaign, ad group, ad variation and keyword that brought you the sale or lead. Once you know what’s working, do more of that, and less of the keywords and ad variations that are bleeding you dry.

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Is paid search the height of responsibility?

In response to The Irresponsible Marketer

Having just read Mitch Joel’s latest post, I was going to post this as a comment, then when I got to writing it and it grew to longer than would be polite, or even that readable, as a comment.

To paraphrase, Mitch is saying that marketers should put as much as they can into search marketing, spending “whatever is left over for your more general branding campaigns”. Now I’m sure that Mitch is trying to seed a discussion rather than truly believing that we should give up on all other kinds of marketing efforts to concentrate on the low-hanging fruit and maximising our Adwords spend and hiring SEO experts..

What about cumulative effects?

I think this is a perfect case for ‘with, not instead of’, to quote Mitch again. Paid search, and to almost the same extent, well done SEO/content marketing efforts are eminently trackable. But what drove that search? Reading this post I immediately thought of David Ogilvy’s belief that a consumer needs to see a message multiple times before they act on it (though as he was head of an ad agency, one might question the number of exposures required). Read the rest of this entry »