Pay per Click (PPC) is a form of online advertising which directs traffic to the advertiser’s website once a user clicks on an advert. The advertiser pays each time his/her advert is clicked hence the name pay per click. However when starting out a pay per click campaign what are the key things to remember and look out for?

1 ) Pick a trusted easy to use platform. The industry favourites are Google adwords and Yahoo search marketing. Most advertisers use Google, this is because more users search on Google in comparison to other search engines.

2 ) Select a budget. Decide on an overall maximum daily budget, this will determine how many clicks you can afford, the more money the more clicks. Secondly decide on how much you want to bid for each click (Cost per Click). The average bid for a click is between 80p and £1.20. Remember that you can always increase you budget once you know what keywords are working for you. There is no need to go in guns blazing.

3 ) Select Key words that are relevant to the website you are trying to promote.  These are the words which users will search for. Think of what users will type into Google to find your products, make sure your key words match the description of what you are offering. If your advert is displayed for keywords that have no relevance to your website, you will be wasting money on clicks which will not convert to sales.

4 ) Create an Objective. If you’re looking for the result of a campaign to be a sale, then create a target objective within the platform so that you can trace how many clicks convert to sales. You’ll end up with a percentage of clicks that meets your objective. The higher the percentage the more successful your ad.

5 ) Watch and observe. Keep a close eye on your campaigns, preferably daily. Analyse which campaigns are doing well, what key words are working, what the click through rate is. This will help you re-direct your campaigns.

6 ) Select key words round two. If certain keywords have low click through rates it could mean that customers are looking for a different product to what you are offering. If Keywords aren’t performing then change them, this technique will overtime refine your campaign to optimise your success.

7 ) Look out for CTR. As mentioned above click trough rate is a ‘must’ to measure. You want a high CTR percentage as this shows that the users clicking your advert are finding what they were looking for. A low CTR means the keywords aren’t working and it’s time for change!

8 ) Move on and expand. As your campaign moves forward add more keywords. If you are using Google adwords, they can recommend some for you or try being more specific about certain products you’re offering. If your adverts are receiving a maximum amount of clicks for the budget you’ve set, why not increase your daily allowance to gain more traffic.

9 ) Keyword Quality. This is important to maximise your budget and results. Quality keywords will have a high click through rate, these are the keywords you want to focus your money on. Any keywords not relevant to your website and with a low CTR will be dead weight to you and a drain on your budget.

10 ) Get your ad ranked. You want your advert to be placed as high as possible. The three main areas to improve ranking are relevance, quality and maximum bid. By creating relevant keywords and a quality site you will defiantly help improve your ranking amongst other adverts. But remember a large factor is your keyword bid; companies that have a higher bid are more likely to have a higher ranking.

If you would like to learn more about PPC please get in contact, we would love to chat to you. Alternatively if you would like to add to our tips, why not post a comment below.

Towards the end of last year Google updated the exam that was required in order to earn Advertisers Professional status. Previously the exam pass rate was 75% and the questions were based upon your knowledge of the Google Adwords system. This has now changed and you need 85% to pass and the questions are a lot trickier and force you to think about the online advertising concept.

This is an interesting move from Google and they are definitely raising the entrance criteria to become an Advertising Professional. No longer is it possible to just take the exam and open up the next day as a PPC Consultant; with this exam you really have to know what you’re doing and actually study.

This is a good thing, the previous exam needed to be updated as PPC advertising has evolved and changed over time. There are different concepts to consider, different ways of making your budget work and understanding a return on investment model.

There are not a lot of accreditations in the Internet Marketing world and I know a lot of customers think this area is full of dark arts and black magic, which is why Google’s accreditation programmes are a good thing. I’m not saying that you absolutely have to be accredited to know what you’re doing; it’s just another way to help your customer make an informed balanced decision.

Anyway, we needed to tidy up our own accreditations and get everything ready for our new website launch later this month, so we recently took on the new exam. How did we do? Have a look below.

If you’re looking for advice about pay per click or just a second opinion, please feel free to contact us on 01635 550431.

Before we go into the way Pay Per Click (PPC) works in the web advertisement world, let us understand what PPC is.

PPC is a model which is used for Internet marketing. It is a web advertising tool in which the payment is made to the host by the advertisers when their advertisement on the web receives a click. In the other case, the advertiser has to pay a fee to the search engine and other Internet publishers when his advertisement receives one or more clicks which bring traffic to his website. This advertisement model is called Cost Per Click (CPC). As far as the search engines are concerned, keyword phrases become very important for advertisers to bid on, and these keyword phrases are more connected with the market that the PPC advertisers are targeting, which bring the visitors to the page displaying the advertisement.

PPC is a model which is called an affiliate model. This differs from the usual model of advertisements, where the intention of the advertisement is to drive traffic to the concerned website. PPC is an advertisement model which is placed on websites of several hosts, and this provides purchase opportunities for the surfers where-ever they may be surfing. PPC offers financial incentives to the advertiser’s affiliate partners in form of a percentage of the revenue earned. PPC is an accepted and popular model in affiliate programs. There are other programs other than PPC, and these include, banner exchange, revenue sharing programs, and others.

Surfers use keyword phrases in search engines to look for products or services they want to avail. When one of these keyword phrases matches the keyword list of an advertiser, the website having a relevant PPC advertisement is displayed to the visitor. These types of advertisements are termed as ’sponsored links’ or ’sponsored ads’, and are mostly found near or above the adjacent results produced by search engines. These advertisements may also appear in other places on the content page depending upon where the developer wishes to place them.

The Internet is browsed by millions of people looking for one thing or the other and this has set the growth in Internet marketing. Advertisement models are constantly evolving and PPC is one such model which has become very popular. There are several others using different kinds of models. However Pay Per Click Campaign (PPC) has become one of the best and effective way to market your products or services on the Internet.

PPC is a way in which you advertise your business on the web with your advertisement appearing on the top and side of search engine results. They also appear on the web pages of the network of advertisers, where the advertisements are displayed at appropriate places on the pages. When keyword phrases match that of the advertiser’s list of keywords, the visitors are brought to the page displaying the advertisement.

The three other largest network operators are, Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCente, and they co-exist along with several PPC providers. All of the network operators work on the basis of a bid based advertisement model. There has been known click fraud in case of PPC advertisement models. However, Google and others have devised automated systems to prevent such frauds. The abuse of PPC advertisement model mostly comes from clicks by competitors or corrupt web developers.

DIY Pest Control has been actively involved in urban and rural pest control since qualifying through the British Pest Control Association in 1991. In 2009 diy-pest-control.co.uk was launched, its aim is to provide the best advice and latest technology to help you to control pests in your home or office.

DIY Pest Control have noticed an increase in natural and organic pest control solutions, and alongside traditional pest control products wanted to support the new site launch by targeting traffic via Google Adwords.

Google Adwords is Google’s flagship advertising product; it offers pay per click (PPC) advertising and site-targeting advertising for customers. Advertisers specify the words that should trigger and present their adverts and specify the maximum amount that they are prepared on a cost per click basis.

PPC is certainly the best way to make an impact and to be visible on the search engines, especially if your organic listings are not quite there yet. We advise clients with new sites to carry out some form of PPC activity while their organic listings mature.

The objective of DIY Pest Controls campaign was to raise awareness, increase traffic and increase sales. It was also a great opportunity to learn and analyse the traffic trends and customer behaviour, as unfortunately this information was not available due to the website only just recently launching.

Initially, Generate UK worked with DIY Pest Control to establish the target keywords; these would be the keywords/phrases that would be bid for in order to attract targeted traffic. Once the keywords had been identified, they were put into relevant keyword families, each family focused on a small number of keywords/key phrases.

The campaign contributed to a huge increase in visits to the site, accounting for as much as 69% of total visits. The increased traffic also contributed to a growth in the number of sales of products, which in turn helped grow the DIY-Pest-Control.co.uk database. Using Google’s own Goals Overview system, it was possible to see how the sales funnel was performing and make informed improvements on the fly.

Rowland Park, Director at DIY-Pest-Control.co.uk stated “I approached Generate UK to help me understand and make sense of PPC as a whole and especially the keywords I needed to target, as I didn’t want to waste any of my PPC budget on words that weren’t going to deliver results. Generate UK showed me that people now search using two, three or even four words rather than just one. They helped me categorise my keywords into groups and structure my PPC approach taking the more generic words and creating more targeted phrases from them. The results were fantastic and the service and insight they provided helped me not only understand the whole process but also delivered me some well needed business, many thanks!”

Click to view the DIY Pest Control website

If you would like to discuss how Generate UK can help you achieve more from your next Pay Per Click campaign, please do not hesitate to  contact us on 01635 550431.

In the last few months we’re seeing more and more of our customers turn to Pay Per Click (PPC) as a cost effective route to market. In these tough economic climates companies want measurable results and through the use of on-page analytics, understanding the conversions rates versus the investment has never been easier to measure.

PPC is certainly the best way to make an impact and to be visible on the search engines, especially if your organic listings are not quite there yet. We advise clients with new sites to carry out some form of PPC activity while their organic listings mature. The problem most businesses face when approaching PPC is knowing how much budget to use and what keywords will bring the best returns.

Understanding what budget to use really boils down to how much you’re willing to invest and how much you’re prepared to pay for a prospect to click on your advert. As a company we always advise an initial test budget so that we can understand what keywords are providing the best returns.

Of course each keywords and phrase costs money, how much money is dependant on how competitive those keywords are. Understanding each keyword’s KEI (keyword Effectiveness Indicator) is really important as this determines the cost versus competiveness.  KEI is a measurement of how many times a keyword is searched for against how many times the keyword appears in other websites.  Ideally you want to seek out the keywords that are obviously relevant to your business, that are highly searched for and do not appear too many times, therefore making the KEI high. A simple equation is normally to divide the number of searches i.e. 100 by the number of time the keyword appear i.e. 30 equals a KEI of 3.3. The higher the KEI the better!

Often or not we find that a company’s keywords are too generic and industry related rather than user related.  Employees can be caught up within their own corporate bubble and the way they normally search for related products or services are not the way their customers do.

Research shows that people now search using two, three or even four words rather than just one so categorising your keywords into groups often helps structure your approach taking the more generic words and creating more targeted phrases from them i.e. mechanic > motor mechanic > motor mechanic Swindon . This also avoids people clicking on a generic keyword i.e. mechanic only to find that they are after an air-conditioning mechanic wasting your valuable budget!

However keyword research only provides an ‘estimate figure’ and through understanding actual result through a trial period will allow you to drill down and hone in on the keywords that are providing the most amount of traffic and the returns you seek.

It’s really important to keep a close eye on your PPC accounts and the statistics it provides. Often people new to PPC waste money in the early stages of their campaigns as they do not understand the processes involved. We also advise, certainly in the early stages to cap a budget i.e. if your budget is £30 per day and the budget is reached then the account automatically turns itself off making sure your spend does not become out of control.

In terms of the advert and relevance, we always ask our clients to think about the advert itself and landing page in which you are driving people to. The reason is that you’ve worked hard to position your advert in front of a prospect you must make sure that your advert stands out from the crowd and that the content is relevant to the advert i.e. The ad is not just taking the prospect through to your home page.  Most annoying and you’ll find that the prospect won’t stay around for very long!

To summarise; I like to think of PPC as the game of Poker, as it always takes a while to learn the game and to understand the hands (keywords- KEI) and your competitors, often you may waste a little but the rewards can be great!

Wow, what a tough year it was in 2008 and if you believe the papers and all the hype, 2009 is going to be an even harder year!

Businesses are going to strive hard to try and increase revenues whilst keeping an exceptionally tight rein on their marketing budgets.

So if companies are slashing their marketing budgets where are they going to focus their spend and how can companies be assured that the marketing channel they use will give them the return that they want?

In a just-released survey from eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit more than 64% of respondents say the current economy probably won’t affect their overall marketing budgets, but most report plans to increase or maintain their budgets for Email (83.6%), Online Advertising (77.2%), Keyword Search Campaigns (75.5%), Social Media (61.8%), and Video Advertising (38.2%). eMetrics’ analysis states,

“34.5% of respondents’ marketing budgets are negatively impacted by the economy but only 10-15% of respondents are cutting budgets on online channels. This would suggest that confidence in online marketing effectiveness continues to grow.”

According to the survey web analytics have become increasingly important to senior management.

“Web analytics helps us maximize the effectiveness of our shrinking marketing dollars by pointing out our strengths and weaknesses and providing an actionable roadmap to our most impactful ROI channels online. Tough times really do call for tough measures.”

You can download the entire survey results from the eMetrics web site.

So it appears that digital marketing is the way forward as through the use of analytics it is 100% visible and that means 100% measurable!  However a question which many marketer asked themselves on a daily basis, which online channel is best for me?

Many companies through using the analytics will trial a number of different campaigns and then through the metrics work out the best return on the investment made.  As the statistic show email marketing is the most popular activity and this is because through past experience for many marketers (mine too!) email has been one of the most cost effective routes to increasing communication, prospect engagement and subsequently business.

Online Advertising and PPC is also up there in the stats and this is because again it’s so measurable. You spend a £1 you get £2 back, brilliant let’s spend £1000! Of course it’s not as easy as this and to gain the returns, you need to put some thorough research into finding the right environments to advertise and research the right keywords. This will provide you with some good solid traffic that is most importantly, targeted!

Interestingly social media and video advertising have both come a very long way in a relatively very short space of time. Companies are finally latching on to the power of social media and the advantages of video advertising becoming viral often through the social media sites and can often catapult a brand to a next level.

If I was a business owner (with a website that has been optimised) experimenting with digital marketing for the first time I would obviously do my own research, however  I would most likely start by delivering some small targeted email campaigns (researching the appropriate email marketing software to deliver my campaigns).  I would then, depending on my product/services use some of my budget to trial and deliver a PPC campaign (I would have probably employed a company to provide me with some extensive Keyword research in the first place so that I’m making sure I’m not wasting my precious marketing budget!). 

In conclusion; do your research, there are many ways to market your company and the online spectrum has multiple channels. However one thing is clear in my head as well as many top marketing executives; is that Digital Media is certainly the way forward through these hard times when budgets are being slashed but you’re still being pressured to produce the result! 

What do you think? Do you have any new ideas to add? Please comment below or add to the debate. Please do not hesitate to contact Generate UK for more information and ideas about how to we can help you with your digital marketing in 2009.

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We try to keep the blog free of obvious advertising and use it more as a source of information for our readers and customers. However in the case of this post, we thought it made sense for us to provide you with more details about our pay per click campaign management solution. We’ve done this because we know there are many companies out there who are considering running a pay per click campaign for the first time. Whilst we would obviously like to have the opportunity to work with them, we would also like to provide them with information that we think would be useful to them, especially if they have never worked in this area before. The guide below is an overview of what we offer, it is also (in our opinion) a guide that companies can use to benchmark against.

Dedicated and Professional PPC Campaign Managers

The success of a PPC campaign is dependent on being able to analyse data and quickly act upon this information. This is why it is very important to have a dedicated and experienced account manager who works with you to understand your campaign objectives. Your account manager will then work within the campaign team to research and identify the right keywords and phrases to bid on, they will also create the right PPC Ad copy designed to compel people to click.

Specialist PPC Software for Accurate Tracking

We have our own in house PPC software that allows us to run multiple campaigns across multiple platforms via one console. This is very important for larger scale campaigns as it allows us to analyse and track across the different search engines and consolidate this information. This level of information means that we can measure the success of your campaign at any time of day or night; therefore you know the impact of every pound that you spend.

Campaign Management Consulting

We work with you to understand your campaign objectives from the very beginning to the end result. This means that the campaign solution we provide you is completely optimised towards your individual company goals.

Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaign Management Services Include:

Bid management

• Budget management
• Bid management
• Keyword and key phrase research
• Copywriting and landing page improvements
• Tracking and measurement reporting
• Click fraud appraisals
• Dedicated and professional account managers
• Specialist inhouse software
• Analysis of competition

Summary

The intention of this blog post was to help people understand what type of service they should expect when they outsource their PPC campaign management. There’s lots of additional information and related blog posts if you would like to learn more. Alternatively, we’d be happy to hear from you, even if it is just for a quick chat about the types of things you should be wary of when you do PPC for the first time.

So whatever stage you are at with your own PPC efforts, we wish you luck. If you think there is something missing from our services, post a comment below, we’d love to hear from you.

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We’re having a pay per click week this week on the Generate UK blog. Feel free to look back on our previous posts about the importance of landing pages and the Beauty and the Beast of PPC. This post is about providing further details about optimising your campaign and where your thoughts should be in order to get the biggest bang for your buck.

In our opinion, the first thing that your visitor should see after they click your ad and go through to your landing page is the keyword or phrase they used. It’s well documented that your page should have a title for SEO and usability reasons, however from a PPC perspective it is a little more important because you have paid for that visitor to be there. So whatever it was that they were searching for and whatever it was that encouraged them to click your ad, you have to make sure that your landing page delivers this.

So let’s think about the heading. The easiest way to do this would be to use an example and walk through the process. Let’s use a driving instructor business for our example, obviously they offer driving lessons as part of their service. Upon completion of their keyword research and analysis, they quickly understand that locality is important to show their ads at the right time. After all, it would be a waste of money if a driving instructor from Cornwall was showing up in searches for “Driving lessons Glasgow”.

In our example, the heading should include the words driving lessons and the locality. Let’s be as specific as possible and assume our driving instructor is based in Winchester. Let’s also assume that our friendly driving instructor has a special incentive for people to click his ads. Our page title or header now becomes -

Driving Lessons in Winchester – First lesson Free

You can change the details of the offer to whatever suits you or your market. The point is that you should think about something compelling to keep your visitor on the page. If they clicked your ad and it only had “Driving Lessons”, our experience tells us that this will not be as successful a campaign as if it was ran with the headline above.

The next step is general marketing, make the offer time dependent. How do you encourage your visitor to act as quickly as possible? You could also mention that the offer is subject to space, so they need to act quickly to secure a spot.

As part of the page copy, you should include your main keyword phrase (”driving lessons Winchester”). Winchester is a big place, so you might want to consider doing the same exercise for smaller suburbs and villages that surround Winchester that you’re happy to service.

Think about what the action is on your landing page, for our driving instructor the ultimate goal is to increase his driving lesson bookings. This objective is made up of smaller goals, if people are clicking his ad then they’re interested in driving lessons in Winchester, right? So how else can they be leveraged once they are there? In this example, the instructor offered vouchers via the site as he knew that parents were often searching on behalf of their children. He also had an incentive for his visitors to sign up and receive a paper about study tips for the theory test and free mock tests.

In summary, your landing page should be as sticky as you can possibly make it, without it looking like spam. You should be relevant to the search term that you’re optimising for and provide a solution or a service that offers a benefit to your visitor. During your planning process, be conscious of the fact that you’re paying for these visitors, so give yourself every advantage to get the most from each click.

We always welcome your feedback and thoughts, please feel free to comment via the comments section below. Or you can find our details on the Contact Generate UK page.

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The reason why people love pay per click (PPC) advertising is that it allows every advertiser to have a fair crack at the whip and advertise their company online via a level playing field. This is the idea anyway, the small time service providers taking on and winning against the largest companies in the world. In actual fact, this is not always the case, like most things in life, money talks. This is certainly true for pay per click.

Speaking to some potential advertiser they do get put off by PPC as they feel they cannot compete with the big companies who have the big wallets and appear to have an unlimited marketing budget to attract clicks to their keywords. So whilst PPC does level the playing field, the usual rules of marketing apply.

It is important to remember that PPC is not a silver bullet, it is part of a wider strategy and the more planning, information gathering and research you put into your PPC campaign the better your results will be. For example, instead of using highly competitive keywords try using a series of phases known as a ‘long tail strategy’ enabling you to spread your budget over a longer period. Often you’ll find that if you’re found under a specific phrase the enquiry is a more serious enquiry so the conversion rate theoretically should be higher.

The trick to PPC is to encourage people to your site who are likely to be interested in your products and services. The general rule is that the more detailed the search phrase, the more targeted the user is. It is important if you are a new PPC advertiser to try different words and phrases and continually monitor your budget and success rate. I can not stress enough how important it is to research your keywords and phrases. You can find out the average traffic for your keywords and phrases by using the keyword traffic indicators when setting up your campaigns however these are only estimates and nothing beats the real thing. Don’t be afraid to use a thesaurus and definitely put yourselves in the mind of your customers who are doing the searches. Often the best place to find good keyword information is your web site statistics. (LINK THROUGH)

Another advantage with PPC is you can cap your budget, I am a PPC advertiser and limit my monthly budget to an amount my business can firstly afford and secondly what provides me with a return on my investment. You can use Google’s Budget Optimiser, which will automatically adjust your maximum CPC (Cost Per Click) according to your budget and will seek out the most clicks possible within your budget. If you’re new to PPC spend some time familiarising yourself with these types of tools and remember that ultimately Google want you to spend money with them, s don’t always do what they suggest.

Something that is often overlooked by inexperienced users of PPC is the effectiveness of their landing page. If you’re paying for people to visit your site, you have to work hard to ensure that they stay on your page and they convert to whatever objective you set for your PPC campaign. This sounds basic, yet we receive many calls a month from companies telling us they are spending thousands without a return, and when we look into it their landing page is their home page. If your PPC advertising is about green dishwashers, make sure the landing page is about green dishwashers and definitely make sure there is a click to action on that page.

PPC does work, especially in the case of an online publishing company who regularly spend £10,000 a month. This sounds like an awful lot of cash to be spending on PPC, however his returns are usually in the region of £20,000 per month, so to this company it makes absolute sense. Their focus is now on improving the conversation rate and capturing as much information about their visitors as possible, so that in future they can market to them directly via email, which is obviously less expensive.

This blog article referred to the beauty and the beast of PPC advertising. Hopefully it is clear what the beauty of PPC is by now? Just to recap, the beauty of PPC is the opportunity to quickly create targeted traffic to your web site. Now it is time to cover some of the beast elements of PPC.

In my mind, there are few areas of PPC to be cautious about… the beasts. One of these is to make sure that you do not have a beast of a landing page. We’ve covered that already in this article, more information can be found by clicking on creating a landing page. If your landing page does not convert then you are wasting your traffic and making Google (or whatever PPC engine you use) richer and yourself poorer.

Another beastly element of PPC is the potential for click fraud. This is when a user, a script or a computer programme clicks through on adverts in order to use up the advertisers budget quicker. An example of this might be your competitor clicking on your adds with no intention of buying your service. This problem does exist, you need to be aware that it exists. The major PPC providers do track the clicks, however it is very important that you monitor and analyse your own data and question any unusual click activities.

There’s also the problem of MFA (made for advertising) sites, these are web sites that have been created with the sole purpose of encouraging their users to click through on the ads their showing. The benefit for these sites is that they earn a fee every time an ad they show is clicked on. These types of sites have been in the spotlight for a few years now and I know that Google for one are doing everything to combat these types of sites. Unfortunately, the truth is that MFA sites are good for Google because they encourage clicks and therefore boost their profits. This is not always in the best interest of the advertiser though.

I’d be interested in hearing about your own pay per click experiences (bad and good) as there is some interesting anecdotal evidence that you receive a boost in the organic SERPs when you start using PPC. We’ve been testing this internally with a number of clients and there seems to be some truth in this rumour, however it is very difficult to prove.

As always, please feel free to post your comments below.

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This week we are looking into Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising in more detail. Since online advertising is set to grow beyond TV advertising in the next five years, there are a lot of companies out there that are going to start exploring whether they should be using PPC.

This is great news for Google shareholders and one of the reasons Microsoft fought so hard in their attempts to buy Yahoo. Their revenues will continue to grow as they jostle for supremacy in the PPC market. It also means that there will be a growth in the number of competitors for advertisers, so differentiating themselves and running better, more effective campaigns that work within their budgets is going to be high on their agendas.

The same rules of supply and demand apply to PPC, so it is a fair bet that as more companies consider moving greater portions of their budgets to online advertising, the higher the bid costs for competitive PPC markets will be.

With that in mind, we thought that it would be useful to start our PPC week by covering the most important facet of PPC. A facet that in our opinion is also the most overlooked; the landing page.

Firstly, in order to avoid confusion; the landing page is the page your visitor arrives on after clicking through via one of your adverts. The landing page is your shop window, as soon as your visitor clicks through it is no longer about just PPC, it is all about marketing and converting your visitors.

As a digital marketing agency, our role is to advise and assist our clients by identifying the right technology that we think will help them to exceed their marketing goals. When we talk to clients, we make this point more than once because in our mind Internet Marketing is a vehicle. It is a vehicle to deliver you more sales and more leads. In this analogy, PPC is the vehicle that is delivering the potential for more sales and leads.

If you take the “Internet” away from “Internet Marketing”, you’re left with just marketing. The same rules of marketing apply on the Internet as they did in the very early nineties pre Internet. The vehicle may be slightly different and the presentation may be more virtual, however the pride you would take in how your office might look to potential visitors should be the same as if the same visitors come to your web site. Perhaps more so if you read the hype about the average web user taking 5 seconds to make up their mind about whether a page or site is of interest to them before going elsewhere.

Hopefully the reason why your landing page is so important is now obvious. If not, let’s look at it another way. You spend a huge amount of time creating your online advert, you spend time researching your keyphrases and the content to attract qualified visitors, you set the campaign up and….. wait, where do you send your visitors. Your home page? Wrong answer, but a lot of people do this. Your contact page? No, but again a popular answer. Our rule is simple with this one, if you are spending money to attract visitors, make them think as little as possible. This means, make the landing page as simple and as clear as possible and relevant to the traffic.

Often what happens is companies create a hastily put together landing page. And because of this, all of their hard work and budget is very likely to be wasted. The number one take away from this article should be that the landing page is the most important part of a PPC campaign.

So now that we have covered some of the theory, let’s look at what we can be doing in order to create the perfect landing page.

Process for Creating Landing Pages that Convert

• Identify your objective for your campaign. Are you trying to sell something, capture their details, encourage them to click through to another page? Whatever it is, take the time to fully understand what your marketing objectives are and then plan agree on what will make the campaign a success. Only by agreeing success metrics can you measure how good or bad a campaign was.
• Do your keyword research. There are plenty of tools available that will help you and often the PPC engine provides help in this area. The keywords should be the words that your potential customers are using to search for your products or services. We’ll cover how to create keyword groups in more detail later in the week.
• Have one action per page if possible. Try not to give your visitors too much choice. This is about having a good campaign objective, if your goal is to grow your list then your page should have one action only, encouraging them to sign up.

• Make sure that your landing page includes the search phrase for which you are targeting. If you include the phrase that your customer used as the page header/title, they are likely to stay on your page for longer.
• Rightly or wrongly, we all lack patience and we all seem to have lost the ability to read an entire page of text. Consider this when creating your landing pages and cater for your audience who might not have the time or the inclination to read everything. The general marketing here is “am I appealing to my audience”.
• Carry out the “So what” test on your landing page. This is when you say “so what” to the points you make. This is a process that is designed to make you think about how you differentiate yourself and become more relevant to your visitors by highlighting the benefits and what is in it for them.
• Check the page a number of times before going live. Is it clear? Does it describe clearly what you want your visitor to do? Has it passed the “so what” test? Does it provide enough benefits to encourage your visitor to complete your desired action?
• Deliver what your adverts say. If you’re offering a solution to a problem, provide this information. This is about making your landing page as specific as possible, don’t make your visitors go looking for this information, this is why they clicked on your ad in the first place.
• Take pride in your landing pages, these are important sales tools. If you’re selling third party products, take the time to rewrite the sales copy. Make your page different to everyone else and differentiate yourselves.
• Ensure that your landing page has the ability to capture the details of your visitors. If they have clicked your advert, they are interested in the topic, take advantage of this by offering them something in return for them giving you their details. Next time you have something interesting to say, you can email market them, which is much cheaper than PPC.
• The benefits of marketing on the Internet is that you have access to the results in an instant. Don’t waste this information, use the analytic and improve your landing pages. If your bounce rate is high, then you need to improve your message. Read through this page again and you will improve this. Try different products, different actions, lay the page out differently. Test, rinse, repeat.

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