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Marketing needs to be managed. If you don’t manage your company’s marketing and build little conversion metrics in to each and every ad how are you going to know what works and what doesn’t?
Pay Per Click isn’t any different. In order to run a good campaign (and not risk losing your shirt in the process) you have to manage it. Sure, anyone can set up a Google Adwords campaign, but do you have what it takes to manage it effectively?
5 Tips for PPC Management
1) Audit your keywords
If one of your keywords is outperforming the others in terms of conversion, increase the bid! Make it more prevalent in the searches. Likewise, if a keyword isn’t performing like you would have hoped, delete it. The keyword isn’t going to feel bad because your rejected it. This is especially true if it is a high cost per click!
2) Test landing pages
One of my favorite things to do is to test different landing pages in PPC. Here’s an example of three ads I tested just recently:
As you can see, all that I changed was the headline. It ended up that Landing Page 2 received almost 3 times as many sign-ups as the other two. So Landing Page 2 won out. And really, it’s an easy change. The headline is an image file. Make three copies of the landing page, sway out the image file, and upload them to your server!
3) Track conversions
Google Adwords has a nice conversion tracking utility that integrates directly into Google Analytics. Make sure you use it. It really isn’t hard to set up at all. You just paste a bit of code on each page that is part of your ‘desired action funnel.’ Whether that be a sale, a signup, or a download.
4) Test ad copy
Make sure you test ad copy religiously. Make sure on your first few days to turn off the prompt that shows ads in relation to clicks. You want to see which ads are working a better than others, so make sure they are showing evenly. In a couple days, optimize the ads themselves and do more of what is working. Then turn on the ad rotation optimizer.
5) Manage your campaign daily
I can’t stress this enough. You need to manage your PPC campaign daily. Not every other day - not every week… Daily. I have seen small business owners lose thousands of dollars because they didn’t feel the need to log in to see how their campaigns were going. And these same people are the ones who are swearing up and down the Internet advertising doesn’t work.
What do you think? Have any other PPC advertising tips you would like to include? You get a free linkback in this post if you share. :0)
Obviously, these are some good tricks and tips for perfect ppc management. A/B testing and multi variation testing are also a good instances for landing pages optimization. We should be more focused on landing page quality for better lead generation and low CPL.