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Landing page development/testing: The main point here is that you shouldn’t simply send
all of your ad respondents to your homepage and hope that they’ll be thrilled to poke around
your site. There may be reasons to send visitors to your homepage – for example, for
“branding” purposes with visitors that you can tell are in the infancy of their buying process –
but in general you’ll want to develop a landing page specific to the offer being made, or one
that handles all the offers made in your family of PPC ads. This is the place where you do
the heavy lifting of capturing your visitor’s contact information and fulfilling the offer you
made, which was the whole point of running a PPC ad ...so clearly it’s worth a bit of thought
and design time. Again, once you have a landing page that works, it’s good to test it against potentially
improved versions, as with everything else in the PPC chain. This becomes a bit more
difficult and costly, since we’re now talking about changes to your web site vs. simple entries
on a search engine’s form. It may also mean manually recording the dates that the different
page versions ran, since your site probably will only capture the usual stats for “the landing
page”, not knowing or caring that the page had totally different content last week than this
week. Although the technology exists to have automatic tracking of different versions of
specific web site pages, few B2B firms other than the largest e-commerce sites make this
investment. But even doing it the old paper & pencil way, it’s usually still worth doing to
ensure that your landing page is doing its best for ROI. As with the other campaign elements, you should also test various offers, since it’s highly
likely that they will have differential conversion rates. Even once you’re satisfied that you’re
running the “best” offer, you’ll probably want to “retire” it after 3-6 months; otherwise, serial
visitors (and there are more of those than you might think) may get a clear impression of
stagnation, which they may attribute to your company and not just your Web marketing. Starting up & maintaining the campaign: The biggest mistake many advertisers make is
not setting up their campaigns correctly in the beginning. But – having now done your
homework and developed a good plan – you can now develop an initial campaign with your
selected keywords, bid prices, maximum daily budget, ad creative and landing page(s), as
outlined above. But note the emphasis on initial above: you really should envision your
campaign as essentially an infinite series of experiments... split tests in which you’re always
trying to beat your last best-performing ad, offer, keywords, etc. With reliable ROI feedback
available in hours or days, fine-tuning a PPC campaign for maximum effectiveness via splittesting
becomes more feasible than with any other medium. Adapting to the major search engines (Google/Yahoo/MSN): As your PPC effort increases in
scope and complexity, you’ll find it advantageous to adapt it to the unique attributes of each
of the search engines that your program employs. This will require detailed study and
ongoing monitoring. While an in-depth treatment is clearly beyond the scope of this paper,
here are at least a few things to keep in mind about the three major engines: Google AdWords uses click-through rate as well as maximum bid price in deciding how high
to rank your ad and/or how often to run it; so if your ad generates no response, it is possible
that it may never run again, no matter how much you bid. Further, in keeping with the
“relevance” philosophy underlying its organic search results, Google also scores your ad and
even your landing page; so (as noted above) it helps to reprise the search keywords in your
ad, and to display some relevant content on your landing page ...certainly more than just a
download button and a lead-capture form. But Google also gives you a 3-level structure
suitable for large-scale advertisers (account, campaign, ad group), along with perhaps the
best user interface and campaign management tools. Like Google, MSN’s AdCenter, the newest of the “Big 3”, also incorporates relevancy factors
into its PPC ad rankings along with bid price. One interesting and unique feature of AdCenter
is that it allows advertisers to vary their bids (for the same keywords/phrase) according to the
demographic profile of the searcher; so that a leisure-travel broker who believes that older
people typically take longer, more expensive vacations might choose to increase his bid
along with the age of the searcher. Yahoo! is the only one of the Big 3 to establish rankings based purely on an open bid-price
auction; so at the moment, you’re free to simply buy the position you want (or can afford)
without worrying about all those other factors. But be aware, it’s temporary; the word is out
that Yahoo! too will get on the relevancy bandwagon as early as the fourth quarter of 2006. << previous | next >>
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