Have you ever tried to figure out just why your pay per click campaign (PPC) might not be working as well as you think it should? First of all, you need to ask yourself: “What are my expectations from doing PPC marketing?” If you are expecting the impossible and really haven’t worked or planned for it – it might be time to re-evaluate your goals.

Many of our clients have had the problem of spending money every month with very little activity occurring on their site. They are looking for help and some remedy to get this problem turned around. You see, setting up a pay per click campaign quickly (by the seat-of-your-pants) and putting money into the account will not necessarily get those sales or prompt people to call you. You need to step back to analyze your designated landing pages to make sure your “paid for clicks” are not wasted by being dumped on a page that does not have good conversion attributes or information relevant to what that visitor is looking for.

Your landing pages should be in direct correlation to what your ad variation says. Picking a general page on your website with lots of information about everything you do, and you direct everyone to it, is not the right approach. If your ad is saying “value”, “sale”, “discount”, etc… your end users should be landing on a page that offers the “value”, “sale”, and “discount”, because that is what the visitor is looking for. Having all of your visitors land on the home page of your site is also not the most effective place for them to land. You need to have a targeted landing page to send your PPC traffic. Not only do you want specific attributes from your ad on the landing page, but it is very important to have some sort of call to actions on your landing page (i.e. large buttons, ‘click here’s, phone numbers, attention drawing motions, etc..). We can talk about “call to actions” more in the future…

If you want this person to call you, you can’t assume they’ll know to call you. You need to make the phone number stand out as much as possible in various areas of your landing pages. If you like them to submit their information through an email or a simple contact form, make sure to have a noticeable lead capture form for that visitor to fill out. If they are looking for a specific type of product, you don’t want to send them to the home page, send them to the specific product(s) page. If you sell products online, it’s even ok to send them straight to a page out of your shopping cart. The best way to figure out what to do is to put you in the shoes of a visitor. What are you looking for when you are searching? Take notes and make sure that you are thorough with everything you’d like to see. You are always more than welcome to call us too. We will actually give you some free basic advice. Just ask!

Finally, double check to make sure the link in your ad is directed to the right page. It frequently happens to people that click on a PPC ad and it is not working, but leads you through a dead link that goes to no where. PPC can be very expensive if you let it. It’s very easy to spend a lot of money and not see much results with it. Be smart, good luck, and let us know if we can help you a long the way.

While thinking about SEO and Web Design ahead of time… and after you have purchased a domain the next thing you have to do is to decide the best look and feel of your website. While it”’’s true that your site needs to be active and that it needs to be SEO friendly, if your site does not look professional and look as though you have put some time and money into your website, you are going to lose almost all credibility with your potential clients or customers from an aesthetic point of view.

You need to decide if you are going to have a content management system (CMS), and if so what kind. If you are building your site as a storefront to an online store where people can come and purchase a product or service from you, you need to look at the back end and see how well it will keep track of things for you. Some of the simple things you need to think about and keep track of are:

• What product/service did people click on?
• How many people got to the shopping cart and then left with out purchasing?
• How many people are actually buying verses just looking?

You also will need to look and see how editable it is. The more editing you can do, the better. The reason for this is when you are doing your SEO you will need to edit many different variables; for instance alt tags, header tags, and many other types of things.

There are many different systems out there such as Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress which will offer you many features which look very enticing. Right now we really like the WordPress system because it”’’s fairly easy to work with and has many SEO friendly pluggins. You need to make sure that they are going to serve you in your efforts. Also make sure that you try not to use any cookie cutter versions of different options without making modifications or it could hurt your placement with your SEO Efforts. Designing a website with SEO in mind from the get go will ultimately save you time and money down the road, while helping you to achieve better rankings sooner. The sooner you can rank for your specific key words, the better exposure you can exponentially have.

Many of you are still in the dark as to what Comparison Shopping is and how it works, so I’m going to provide some quick comparison shopping information to help you decide if it’s right for you. To keep it brief and simple, I’m going to leave out some of the nitty gritty details that take a while to explain.

Just to give a quick overview first about what it is, comparison shopping sites provide users with the ability to search for a product and then see the price of that product at multiple websites. So, for example, if you’re looking for a Canon EOS 50D 15.1MP SLR Digital Camera and you want to find the best price, you can go to Nextag.com today and compare the prices of 14 different sellers. On that product, the prices range from $929 to $1596, and you were able to do the price comparison within 10 seconds rather than looking at different sites for 30 minutes to find the best price.

Some of the major Comparison Shopping Engines include Shopping.com, Shopzilla.com, Pricegrabber.com, Smarter.com and Yahoo Shopping. Google Product Search is not a traditional comparison shopping engine but should be mentioned because it’s the most heavily trafficked, produces more sales than any other engine, and it’s free. It’s a good place for starters to see if there is demand for your product.

Now, the logistics: Comparison Shopping sites rely on their clients sending “data feeds” which are basically excel spreadsheets with all of their product information. The information required includes SKU, Price, Title, Description, Image URL, Manufacturer, Condition (new, used, refurbished) and Category. There is also a lot of non-required information that you can provide as well, but we’re not going to get to that in this brief overview. Most shopping carts have the ability to export a data feed with all the required information, so the basic process with comparison shopping is to extract the data feed, manipulate the data feed to make the campaign effective, and submit the data feed to the comparison shopping engines via FTP or direct upload. After the feeds are uploaded and processed, you’re ready to roll.

Comparison shopping is a form of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing. Every time that someone clicks on your listing and is brought to your site, you are charged a click fee. Some sites allow you to bid for higher placement and others have a flat-rate fee structure where each category on their site has a pre-determined click fee. Most click fees range from about $0.25 cents to $0.60 cents, but they can be higher or lower depending on the comparison shopping engine. One engine charge $0.55 cents a click in their electronics category and $0.25 cents in their musical instruments category, while another site might have them reversed. It generally depends on how much the comparison shopping engine is paying to get the traffic there.

The click fees are generally much lower than traditional pay-per-click charges through Google, Yahoo or MSN, but the traffic is usually a lot lower as well. Low traffic is generally the disappointment with anyone that is discouraged with comparison shopping. In general, the plus side to comparison shopping over traditional PPC is that the conversion rates (percentage of sales vs. clicks) are much higher because comparison shopping engines allow the consumer to do all their shopping on their site before they click and visit yours. They know exactly what they’re going find when they get to your site as opposed to PPC where they aren’t really sure what they’re getting and they often hit the back button quickly if they don’t immediately see what they’re looking for. Conversion rates for comparison shopping are often 2 or 3 times as high as PPC.

Comparison shopping is not for everyone though. For example, if you sell coca-cola memorabilia and all of your products are $3-$6 with a average total purchase of $10, comparison shopping probably won’t be profitable for you. Assuming your gross margin is 50% on all of your products, you only have an average of $5 per sale to spend on marketing before you’re in the red. That means that if you were getting clicks for $0.25 a click you would need to get at least 1 sale for every 20 clicks and that’s unlikely. You might get it though, who knows, but even if you got 1 in 20 you’re still only breaking even. You would want to do more like 1 in 10 to make a decent profit margin per each item. On the flip side, if your average ticket is $250 with a gross margin of 40%, you have $100 to work with and if you can get 1 sale for every 100 visitors to your site (which is average), it would cost you $25 and you’d profit $75 on that item after all was said and done. In essence, it is easier to have a profitable comparison shopping campaign if you sell bigger ticket items.

One other thing to keep in mind is that there are some products that just don’t sell well online. Let’s use waste baskets as an example. They’re cheap, plain, bulky to ship and easy to find at any local variety store. Products like that do not sell well. When people are shopping online they’re looking for a great price or for something that they can’t find at a local store. Some people shop online for convenience but probably not for waste baskets. Big ticket items that people can save $300 on by buying online do really well as well as unique and hard to find items. Someone may actually be willing to buy a waste basket online, if it’s part of a bathroom set that has a shower curtain, bath mat, soap dish, and toothbrush holder that were too cute for words and that they never could have found locally.

Comparison shopping can be a great source of revenue or a great waste of money depending on whether your products are a good fit for the service and whether the campaign was executed correctly. What this amounts to for most ecommerce businesses, is that it”’’s another great channel to market your products. Ask us more about comparison shopping management and how it works for your benefit!

Managing a Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaign is like playing soccer. Anyone can do it with a bit of effort but there’s a reason why David Beckham is world famous, earns millions of dollars, and I don’t. It’s because he has a great deal more skill in the game than I do. The same analogy can be used for PPC Management- anyone can do it but not everyone has the ability to do it well. In fact, it is very easy to lose a lot of money very quickly if a PPC campaign is not set up or managed correctly.

A successful campaign can be very lucrative but it can be very time consuming and needs to be closely monitored. Cost per Click (CPC) bidding wars can get very heated, and can change numerous times in a single day. An entire campaign can rise or fall on “buying” keywords at the right price.

If you are too busy to monitor your campaign yourself, you really have 2 options – employ the services of a PPC management company – or spend your money elsewhere!

A good PPC management company will make sure that your campaigns are targeted, affordable, and controlled. By careful and constant monitoring they can ensure you are building brand presence and generating leads at a competitive ROI.

Some of the tactics employed by the better PPC managers include working with you, analyzing your site and your competitors sites to find effective keywords. They can expand the keyword list by adding misspellings (how often do you mistype something when trying to rush on a search? Or better yet – how many of you spell it “morgage”?), and using geographic modifiers, or buying modifiers such as “Free”, “Cheap”, “Special” etc…

Making a PPC campaign go live is just the start. The real key to a profitable campaign comes once it is up and running. A PPC campaign needs to be constantly massaged, reviewed and refined, as do the keyword bid costs. This needs to be done on at least a day by day basis. Without this constant tweaking it is easy to spend $50.00 to make one $20.00 sale.

Your PPC campaign can be very successful and very profitable if it is handled correctly.

By 2010, it is predicted that online marketers will spend well over $7 billion dollars on PPC advertising (Jupiter Research). So PPC programs are only going to get more competitive and more expensive. Therefore, it is going to get more and more important that if you want to play the PPC game you have to have an effective pay per click management strategy in place.

There are multiple effective ways to run your PPC campaign. Stay tuned and soon we’ll discuss the 4 simple types of strategies you can use.

If you need any assistance with your pay per click management, we can certainly help you out. With over 10 years of experience in search engine marketing, we have the know-how and knowledge to keep your campaign running as smooth and effective as possible. Give us a call to see what we can do for you.