Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns are a deceptively simple way to immediately guarantee a stream of leads for your business. Functioning as a complement to a traditional SEO campaign, a PPC campaign takes advantage of paid search advertisements to invite potential customers to a landing page, usually separate from your main website, which will capture your leads’ information.
PPC Campaigns have a few distinct advantages as an advertising method:
· You only pay for leads who click on your ad. Since ads cost a certain amount of money per click, you’ll never be paying for ads that sit idle without activity. This makes PPC campaigns one of the most predictably cost efficient forms of digital marketing available. If you know the approximate value of a lead that comes in through PPC, you’ll eventually be able to calculate the exact ROI of the campaign.
· You can target traffic to different landing pages. For instance, if you have three major products, you can segregate your audience to three separate landing pages.
· You’ll get a concentrated stream of leads. PPC does almost nothing for your brand familiarity, but it will provide a solid backbone of steady leads.
There are three main elements of a PPC campaign you’ll need to worry about:
· Budget. You’re going to be paying Google to advertise your business in search results. Different keywords have different price levels, called cost-per-click (CPC), which as you might suspect, is the amount of money you’ll pay each time the ad is clicked.
· Clicks. In order to maximize the number of clicks your ad gets, you’ll need to have expertly written copy and relevant ad placement. It might take time to find the right pairing of keywords and copy that leads to the highest number of clicks.
· Conversions. Once your leads hit your landing page, it’s up to you to make sure they’re driven to reach out to you or send you their information.
On the budget and clicks sides of things, you’ll need to actively monitor your best and worst performers over the course of a few months, and make gradual changes until you have a reliable stream of clicks coming in from your ads. Google AdWords features a number of tools, including the Google Keyword Planner, to help you track, analyze, and understand what keywords you can and should be going after.
As for the conversions, that side of success can only come from the quality of your landing page. Fortunately, most successful PPC landing pages have several qualities in common:
1. They’re simple. Don’t get flashy. Don’t stuff your landing page with content. Keep your message and your design as simple as possible.
2. Their forms are easy to find and easier to fill out. That means your form needs to appear very prominently above the fold. Include an arrow or highlight the box if possible. Additionally, you’ll need to limit the number of fields needed to complete the form—full name, email, and phone number, with one optional qualifier is usually all you’ll need. Too many fields and people will be turned off.
3. They have contact information. In addition to your form, include a phone number and an email address people can use to contact you. Not everybody likes the “submit and wait” approach to contact.
4. They link to a fuller website. If someone needs more understanding before they’re willing to share their personal information with you, give it to them. Include a link to your website.
5. They’re pretty. It’s a simple quality, but don’t underestimate it. People love beautiful landing pages—just make sure it’s consistent with your brand.
6. They have a free offer. Nothing gets people to sign up like free things. Offer a major discount or some other kind of promotion to your leads—but only if they send you their information.
Web advertisements, like banner ads on third party sites, work very similarly to a PPC strategy. You’ll pay a fixed amount, perhaps per click or on a monthly basis, in exchange for a steady stream of leads. You can even use the same landing page as long as you are able to track both independently.
The major advantage of PPC campaigns is still their cost efficiency. If you want a tightly measured channel for leads with a predictable and provable ROI, PPC campaigns are one of your best options. However, if you want to build a full web presence and an increasingly dominant brand, PPC campaigns are best left as a peripheral or complementary strategy.
