Are you getting the most from your pay per click (PPC) campaigns? How would you know? Are you as efficient at getting clicks and converting visitors as you would be carrying water with a leaky bucket? Let me give you 7 signs to tell that you are not optimizing your PPC spend:
1. You use the set it and forget it strategy to PPC. If you setup your PPC campaigns months ago and haven’t adjusted a thing in it, I can practically guarantee you have room to improve it. The seasons change, traffic flow and traffic quality change, even Google’s Quality score changes.
2. You don’t have proper tracking in place. In a recent study of over a 1000 small and midsize businesses it was found that over half failed to properly track conversions. You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Do you have enough insight to what is happening with your PPC ad spend?
3. You have not tested at least 3 variations of your PPC ad. Try testing the following variables in your ad copy: headlines, different offers, variations of your USPs (Unique Selling Propositions) or UCPs (Unique Campaign Propositions, and calls to actions (try, learn, get, save, etc.).
4. You have not tested matching options. If you are not getting enough traffic at your bid prices, test the different matching options. Test between broad, phrase and exact (standard) match to see which brings you the best combination of traffic and converted sales.
5. You have a long list of keywords in your ad groups. The keywords in an ad group should be tightly associated and extremely relevant to each other so you can be sure the ad(s) and landing page are effective for the ad group.
6. You have poor scent from the ad to the landing page. In 2001, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, shared their research with Wired on how humans look for information on the Web; they use the same food-gathering techniques employed by animals. They follow scent. Make sure to match your PPC ad text with the message on your landing page.
7. You aren’t testing your landing pages to maximize conversion. With over 1100 variables that impact conversion, if you aren’t testing to see what the best combination to use are, you are leaving money on the table. You should always be testing.
