Real Web Marketing Blog

Landing Pages 2012

By John Eberhard

A landing page is a page on your web site where you have someone arrive, or land, when they click on some kind of online promotion. This promotion could be an email with a link at the bottom, a pay per click ad, a banner ad, a press release, or any other promotional action online that offers a link to your web site.

Typically it is a good idea to create a customized landing page to have your visitors land on, rather than have them land on your home page. This is pretty much considered common knowledge in the Internet marketing community. Yet I still often see Google AdWords campaigns, for example, that have the visitor land on the company’s web site home page.

The reasons that it is important to have visitors land on a customized landing page are:

a. Having a customized landing page allows you to tailor the content of the page to exactly what the person is responding to and looking for.

b. Landing the person on your home page forces him to search around on your home page for the link to exactly what he is looking for. A customized landing page saves him the time and trouble.

c. A customized landing page can be coded in such a way that when your visitor responds, you know exactly where that reach came from.

What Goes on the Page?

There are some definite do’s and don’ts regarding what should be on a customized landing page. These are things that affect the percentage of people that respond, which we of course want to be as high as possible.

1. Sales copy: You want to have sales copy on that page. Some people say to make the sales copy short and sweet. Others say that long copy sells. The only way to know for sure for your product or service is to test it both ways. Make sure what you talk about in your copy matches the ad or email.

2. Pictures: Include several pictures on the landing page that illustrate what the sales copy is talking about.

3. Branding: Be sure to include a header at the top of the page showing your company logo. Since this is potentially the first contact the person will have with you, the branding shows him that you are legitimate.

4. Testimonials: Putting one or two testimonials on the landing page is always good, as it gives you more credibility.

5. No navigation: I nearly always have a hard time getting clients to accept this, but I have found over 12+ years of experience in both email and pay per click landing pages, that it works better to not have navigational buttons on a landing page. When I say it works better, I mean that in roughly 90% of cases a landing page with no navigation, where the visitor’s only choices are to read your copy and respond to your offer, gets higher percentage of response than when you give him the option to navigate around your site. When you give them navigation buttons, they wander around your site and then leave. Keeping them on the one page focuses and better controls the experience and process. The only exception I have found to this is with home improvement companies with a highly visual and aesthetic product, where the visitor will want to see a photo gallery. In all other cases, I have found that the response percentage is higher when the landing page does not have navigation buttons.

6. Call to action and offer: It’s important to have a clear call to action, i.e. telling the prospect to respond, and to put this prominently at the bottom of your page, or in the right sidebar. Lately I have been testing putting the call to action in the right sidebar rather than at the bottom of the page and this has been working well. It is always helpful to offer something specific, and if you can offer something free, usually information that can be sent electronically and cost you nothing, that usually increases response.

7. Response form: It is vital to put both a response form and a phone number on your landing page.

8. Coding: You can code the response form so that the subject line of the email that arrives in your inbox will include a name or code that tells you where that person came from. I favor doing separate landing pages for each campaign so you know that the person came from your Campaign #1 on Google or whatever.

9. Multimedia: I have extensively tested putting video clips or audio clips on landing pages, and have found that in most cases it increases response to have multimedia on the page. You can set your audio clip, for instance, to start playing as soon as the person lands on the page. But make sure to put a button there for the person to turn off the clip if they want.

Testing and Tracking

Testing different copy, pictures, multimedia, testimonials, offers and other elements on your landing page is very important. Every time you make a change, make sure that you code the new campaign or landing page in some way, so you can track the response and compare it to earlier versions. I use 4-digit codes on all my landing pages and find this works well.

Testing and carefully tracking the results has been a vital part of direct marketing actions for over 20 years. It’s no different with the Internet and if anything, it is easier to track things with the Internet.

I now favor using some sort of phone tracking system, where you use different phone numbers for your different campaigns, the calls are all recorded in an online system, and the call is then bounced to your main number. This eliminates a notoriously weakness of most companies, where they are bad at tracking where phone call leads came from.

Good luck with your landing page and website marketing efforts.

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How You Respond to the Economy

By John Eberhard

Occasionally I hear someone saying that there is no recession and you can’t believe all that junk you read in the newspapers. If you just have a positive attitude it will all come out all right and things will be great.

I think this is a foolish, Polyanna sort of response to the economy. But I think there are ways to be positive and survive tough economic times. So what is the right response to this economic situation that we are in?

Well first of all I think it is important to realistically assess conditions in the environment. We have been in a recession for a couple years even if the government tries to tell us it ended over a year ago.

That means that consumers are right now less likely to buy things that are considered luxuries, and even with necessities, they will in some cases tend to buy less of them or delay the purchase. This is what I am seeing with clients.

So while I don’t feel I am a pessimist and I don’t urge people to be pessimists, I think you do have to see what is actually there. Then how should you respond to it?

Well I do agree that the news media try to make it all worse, and the effect on us tends to be that we accept a new reality of lowered expectations. In other words, we get sort of apathetic and feel like things just won’t be as good as they were before.

And you can look back to before the recession started, and it is true that there were some artificial conditions there with the real estate boom and the government pushing lenders to give mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them and all that. So the real estate market and mortgage market is probably not going to come back to its 2005 levels anytime soon.

But what about other industries? I think that for other industries, it is up to us. And what I mean by that is, as a business owner or marketer, you can’t get caught up too much in the pessimism. Yes, you have to know what is going on, but you have to also continue to promote your product or service aggressively.

By promoting your business aggressively and actively doing website marketing, you are creating a new more prosperous reality for the future. The idea is to “out-create” the downturn. Of course you have to have promotional campaigns that work and part of that is having good surveys of your target public.

And incidentally, you might need new surveys, if your last surveys were done prior to the recession or crash or whatever you want to call it. Because their attitudes towards buying your product have probably changed since then. And your promotion needs to speak properly to the attitudes they have now.

So the key in my opinion is:

1. Don’t get discouraged
2. Know what’s going on in your market and in the economy
3. Keep promoting and marketing aggressively
4. Make sure you have the right message that will speak to your public and their attitudes now.

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Case History: SEO and Social Media Client

By John Eberhard

I have a client who does what she calls “developmental editing,” or in other words, editing of the manuscripts of writers. She doesn’t just edit for spelling and grammar, but helps the author really develop the story and the characters. Quite a few of her clients have had their works published by traditional publishers and one of her author clients was just recently signed to a multi-movie deal.

This client came to me in August 2010 and wanted search engine optimization (SEO) done for her web site.

We did keyword research, wrote titles and descriptions and put all that information in the appropriate places on her site. Then we set up multiple blogs for her, and embarked on a link building program that included taking one of her articles and posting it each month on articles directories and on some high profile sites like Squidoo.com and Google Knol, and writing a press release each month and posting it on online PR sites. Both the articles and press releases have also been posted on her multiple blogs.

Then in June 2011 we started working this client’s Twitter account, by adding new followers and posting status updates. When we started this client had 4 followers on Twitter, and we started targeting writers. At first I was doing about 8 status updates for her per month, then a few months ago I switched to doing what are called “auto tweets,” where the software I use sends out 20 tweets per day that I have written for her. These tweets give links to various pages on her web site and to her various articles with advice to writers.

When I started working with this client in August 2010, she was getting around 200 visits to her web site per month. She had 8 keywords on page one of Google and 11 keywords one page one and two. In the first month that we tracked it she got 77 organic referrals from Google, which means 77 times someone searched on Google and clicked on an organic, or non-paid listing that appeared there and arrived on her site. She had 722 links to her site.

In November 2011 this client’s web site got 528 visits, and in December the site got 775 visits, which represents a 287% increase over the traffic the site was getting when we started tracking it. In December the site got 196 organic referrals from Google. She now has 17 keywords on page one of Google and 23 keywords on pages one and two. The site now has 11,200 links to it. And this client now has 2,118 followers on Twitter.

But the real shocker this past month came from Twitter. In December this client got 214 referrals from Twitter. That means 214 people saw a status update on her Twitter account and clicked on the link and came to her site. Of course it helps that she now has 2,118 followers. But the auto tweets appear to be the main cause of that big increase in traffic from Twitter.

A friend told me he was doing the auto tweets and that it was really working for him. I was skeptical of it at first but decided to pilot it on several of my clients. Now I am really sold.

The above shows what a solid SEO program can do when you do consistent link building over a period of time, and it also shows the power of a social media marketing program.

 

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Wordpress and Catalyst

by John Eberhard

Wordpress is a blogging system, arguably the best. But because it is so easy to use, many people today also use it to develop whole web sites.

Using Wordpress as a platform to develop a web site allows the site owner to log in and easily make changes to the content of the site themselves. When I say “content” I am referring to the text and pictures. (To make design changes you need more web design knowledge.)

This easy access to the web site - allowing the site owner to make content changes - seems to be very appealing today, and so more and more people are opting to have their sites designed in Wordpress or a similar Content Management System (CMS). I like Wordpress because I feel it is the easiest to learn, and for that reason it appears to be becoming the most popular.

I started working with Wordpress a couple years ago and in the last year have made several sites in Wordpress (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Then finally I made the leap and re-designed my own site in Wordpress and put the new version up live last week.

Themes

Once you set up your site in Wordpress, you have to select a theme. A “theme” is their word for the overall design for the site. You can select from hundreds of pre-made, free themes. Most of these are pretty plain and so most people have a custom design done for them, which is then converted into Wordpress format.

Initially I created custom designs and then had someone else convert these to Wordpress for me. Then I discovered a custom theme called Catalyst, which you buy and install, and it then gives you hundreds of design options. So now I use Catalyst to create my designs. It has a bit of a learning curve to it, but overall I think it’s a great product.

Other Advantages of Wordpress

Other than the obvious advantage that Wordpress allows you to make changes to your web site yourself, there are a number of other advantages.

1. Easy, site-wide changes: With Wordpress you can make changes to the design or to the navigation, and you just have to make the change once and it goes into effect for the whole site, rather than making the change on every page. This is probably more important for designers.

2. Plugins: Wordpress has hundreds of what they call “plugins,” which are small programs that work within WP to give you added functionality. Here are examples of some of the available types of plugins:

a. Photo Galleries: There are some really high quality photo galleries available. I like the NextGen Gallery the best.

b. Google Analytics: You can hook up Google Analytics to your site so you can track visitors, in about 10 minutes.

c. Forum: You can set up a forum on your site pretty easily.

d. Polls: You can run polls on your site.

e. SEO: You can install a plugin that makes it easy to implement search engine optimization on your site.

f. Events Calendar: You can put an events calendar on your site.

g. Forms: There are a number of plugins that make it easy to create forms for your site.

h. Facebook and Twitter: There are plugins that make it easy to interact with your Facebook and Twitter accounts, such as showing a feed of recent activity.

i. Buddypress: This is a plugin allowing you to set up a Facebook-like social networking site of your own. I haven’t used it but hear it is pretty easy to work with.

j. Share: You can add “share this” type buttons to allow visitors to share a page on social media sites.

k. Backup: You can get a plugin that makes it easy to regularly back up the contents of your Wordpress site.

l. Nivo Slider: A “slider” is a new term for a slide show. Nivo makes a really slick slider that you can set up on your Wordpress site (it comes free for Catalyst owners). I set up one of these on my home page, and it has really cool transition effects between the slides.

Overall I think that moving to a Wordpress site has a lot of advantages today.

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Internet Marketing New Year’s Resolutions for 2012

by John Eberhard

Now is the time to make New Year’s resolutions on how to improve your Internet marketing for 2012. Here are my suggestions for you.

Google Maps: I resolve to take steps to get a Google Maps/Places listing online for my business and work to get that listing onto the first page of results by getting lots of positive online reviews about my business and putting up lots of listings about my business, all of which pushes my Google listing towards page one.

Web Site: I resolve to make sure my web site gets fully re-designed in 2012 if it has not been re-designed since the Civil War, and to update the content of the site regularly so it is current and fresh. (I hear my web designer can convert my site into Wordpress so I can make revisions to the site myself.)

Identity Capture: I resolve to offer items on my site such as free email newsletter subscriptions, and free reports and eBooks, to capture the identities and email addresses of people visiting my site. I know that this is one of the best ways to grow my email list.

Video: I resolve to get a video made for my business in 2012 if I don’t yet have one, or to create more video content in 2012 if I already have some, knowing that online video marketing is one of the best ways to present my business and sell it.

Posting to the Blog: I resolve to post new content to my blog at least once a week in 2012, realizing that search engines give more weight or importance to blogs specifically because they usually have fresh content added regularly. I realize that a blog post can be just a comment and link to some other content on the web, or posting a video of interest from YouTube. I realize that putting up a blog, but not posting anything to it in 2011 (you know who you are) doesn’t help my online efforts.

Web Statistics: I resolve to ensure my site has some sort of good web statistics program such as Google Analytics, and to regularly check the stats so I know how many people are coming to the site, what pages they are visiting, what sites are referring me traffic, and what keywords people are typing in on search engines to find me. I know that most free web stats programs that come with a hosting plan are total crap, and that Google Analytics is free and very good.

SEO and Keyword Research: I resolve to get search engine optimization done for my web site is 2012 if it has not been done in the last two years, knowing that the Google Panda update makes this even more important than before. I know that I should be targeting keywords that have high traffic, but a low number of competing sites. I know that with a local business I should be targeting local oriented keywords.  

Email Newsletter: I resolve to create an email newsletter if I don’t have one already, and to ensure I get a new one out at least once a month. I resolve to offer the newsletter subscription on my site and build my email list.

Link Building: I resolve to greatly increase the number of links to my site from other sites, knowing that Google says that the number of links is the most important criteria they use to determine how high my site will rank for my targeted keywords.

Social Media: I resolve to use social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn more often in 2012 to market my business. But I know that I also have to be engaged with my friends and followers, respond to their posts, and to sometimes post things about my personal life, not just hammer people with “buy my products” type messages. I resolve to significantly increase my number of friends and followers on social media sites in 2012.

Leads/Sales: I resolve to get my web site really producing leads and/or sales in 2012, so that the site is a real contributing force towards the success of my business and not just a source of frustration and embarrassment.

Google: I resolve not to give Google god-like status like some people do. They’re just a business for cryin out loud. I resolve not to freak out about the Panda update but to make appropriate changes in my actions at the appropriate time.

RealWebMarketing.net Fun Game: I resolve to respond to the little jokes in the RealWeb Newsletter, and build up points so I can win a Real Web Marketing T-shirt and be the envy of all my friends.

Consultant: I resolve to respect and take the sagely advice of my marketing consultant, and to pay him on time.

I wish you the best in keeping your New Year’s resolutions, and I feel confident that 2012 will be the best year ever for all of us.

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Wordpress.com Shuts Down Sites

by John Eberhard

Wordpress.com has started doing something that I consider idiotic. They are taking down any blog on their system if they discover you have been (gasp!) linking to commercial web sites in your blog posts. Another example of the misguided "anti marketing" attitudes you see around in various places on the Internet and in the IT world.

They have taken down my blog on there and several that we made for clients. So I am going around them. I am creating sub-folders on one of my domains and creating Wordpress blogs for clients there.

I remember running into this "anti Marketing" attitude when I worked at Executive Software and at Panda Software. I wonder if those people would have pause to consider where their paychecks come from and the fact that marketing to a large extent makes it possible for commerce to take place and for them to earn a living.

Here is exactly what they said in response to an email:

“You agreed to the WordPress.com Terms of Service when you signed up.

”WordPress.com does not allow blogs that are created for the purpose of directing traffic or creating backlinks to commercial web sites, affiliate/ptc programs or multi-level marketing campaigns. Your site has been suspended and will not be returned to you.”

It's amazing how many of these sites are like this. HubPages.com has a very similar anti marketing policy. You can have one link on each page you make and not any more.

My plan is to not use Wordpress.com any more.

 

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Internet Marketing in 2012

by John Eberhard

At this time of year, going back for several years, I usually do an article about what we can expect from Internet marketing in the coming year.

a. Pay Per Click Advertising: PPC is still a very dominant force and very effective, though its use is pretty much limited to high ticket items because of its cost. PPC is an excellent way to drive traffic to your site on an immediate basis, and due to the excellent statistical and monitoring tools, in skilled hands it can be very effective. It’s just not viable for selling books and CDs.

b. Social Media: Social media will continue to be an important avenue in online marketing, with Facebook being the big player, then YouTube, then Twitter, then LinkedIn. I think social media is a great vehicle for marketing small businesses with limited budgets and for low cost items. A little over a year ago Facebook made changes allowing you to customize the look of your fan pages, with one screen that visitors would see before they “liked” you and a different one afterwards. MySpace really crashed in the last year in terms of usage, and was sold for peanuts, after having been the biggest thing in social media just a few years ago. With Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, the key is to get lots of friends/followers/connections, so that whatever communications you send out get seen by lots of people. Google+ is Google’s entry into the social media universe (similar to Facebook), and will start to become more popular in the coming year.

c. SEO: Search Engine Optimization has always been a vital part of website marketing and that will not change in the coming year. The term refers to doing research to find the best keywords to use, then inputting those keywords into specific places on your website, then building up links to your site from other sites around the web.

The major techniques Real Web Marketing Inc. has used for link building for the past few years have been:

1. Submitting articles to article directories
2. Writing press releases and submitting these to online PR sites
3. Creating multiple blogs and posting articles and releases to these, including links back to the client’s main site

Google came out with a new algorithm update in February 2011 called “Panda,” and has come out with minor updates every couple of weeks since then. The major purpose of the update appears to be to stop people from building up links to their sites via article directories. We are still doing link building using the techniques listed above, and I am closely watching the statistics for these clients to see if Panda is defeating our efforts. The above program is still working fine as measured by statistics. But we can probably figure that sometime in the next year, the effectiveness of article marketing will diminish, and we will have to come up with another method of developing links.

d. Local SEO: I should explain that there are two significantly different approaches to SEO. It depends on whether your company is local, i.e. only delivering products or services to a specific geographical area, or regional or national. This distinction has become much more important in the last year.

For local companies, it is much more important to go for local oriented keywords, i.e. keywords that mention the city or cities where the company does business. In other words, a dentist would not try to target or rank for general keywords like “dentist” or “root canals,” because he would be competing with basically every other dentist on the face of the earth. Instead he would target keywords like “dentist Glendale” or “dentist Pasadena,” or “root canal Glendale.” You still have to do keyword research to find keywords that have traffic coming to them, because it doesn’t do any good to target a keyword and rank number one for it when nobody searches for it. If you’re in a major metro area like Los Angeles it is smart to include research on keywords relating to names of suburbs or neighborhoods.

Once you find local oriented keywords that have search traffic, you put those keywords into your site the same way as you do for national SEO. Another technique is to select the largest traffic keywords on your list and register some domain names that contain those keywords in the name. Then put up a micro-site on those domains, i.e. a small site. Make sure you don’t make that site identical to your main site as Google frowns on multiple identical sites.

Once you complete keyword research, input those keywords into your main site, and put up one or more microsites, then you still have to do link building, to get your site ranking for those keywords.

e. Local Marketing: This has been the biggest change in the last year. Google has completely changed the search landscape with the introduction of Google Maps/Places. When someone enters a search that Google determines is local in nature, they put up a map in the right hand column showing businesses near you. And then you will see listings in the left hand column related to the red dots on that map. Google keeps changing the way the listings are displayed. Right now there is a special section in the left hand column with all the Google Maps listings. Both Yahoo and Bing have introduced a similar feature.

The first thing to do is to make sure there is a listing on Google Maps/Places for your business. Google gas created thousands of listings for businesses, but not all of course. So you have to see if you have a listing and if so, claim it. If not put one up.

Then in order to get your listing to appear at or near the top, you have to put up listings (called “citations” in Google parlance) on other local listings sites, and ensure you get online reviews from your customers. So this is an ongoing action and is very important, especially in competitive industries, because getting your Google Maps/Places listing on page one of the results will drive a lot of traffic to you.

f. Email Marketing: The most effective use of email marketing today is to build up a large in-house email list by offering an email newsletter or offering other items such as white papers or special reports, then sending newsletters and other offerings to that list. Many companies neglect this completely and are leaving money on the table. Just make sure you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.

g. Blogs: I have written extensively about the effectiveness of blogs. They are one of the best things you can do, and it’s free. I have several blogs and for the last several years they have been the biggest source of traffic to my main site. But once you start a blog you have to post to it regularly for it to do any good.

h. Video: Video is a great way to effectively communicate the benefits of your products or services, and posting on YouTube and other video sharing sites can give you lots of exposure.

Best wishes for 2012 and may it be your most prosperous year ever. There is no question that the economy is affecting us all, but with smart and effective marketing we can overcome it and be successful.

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SEO Today

by John Eberhard

SEO stands for search engine optimization. The purpose of SEO is to get your web site to rank well for certain specific keywords on search engines, so that you get more traffic to the site from those search engines.

It used to be that SEO meant taking actions to the site itself to make it more likely to rank for your keywords, which is called “on-page optimization.” It still means that, but now the term has taken on the additional meaning of actions you take to build up links to your site, which is called “off-page optimization.”

Local or National?

The first thing to do when considering embarking on search engine optimization is to determine whether your business is local or national in nature. Do you sell products or services to people only in one local area, or nationally or internationally?

If yours is a local company, then your efforts should be directed towards ranking well on Google Maps, Yahoo Local and Bing Local, as well as doing SEO specifically for local oriented keywords, i.e. keywords that contain the name of the cities or towns where you do business. See my recent articles on local businesses and Google Maps.

National

If you have a national business like mine (I do business with companies all across the U.S.) then you need to do regular SEO. This consists of:

1. Keyword Research: This means to come up with a list of possible keywords and then finding out the amount of traffic they are getting (how many people are searching for them), and the number of sites that are competing for them. You want to find keywords that have a low number of sites competing for them, because if the number is too high, you just won’t be able to compete for those keywords, at least not in the short term. I consider the number of competing sites to be more important than the traffic per keyword, and I sort the keywords and group them by the number of competing sites. Most single word keywords are too competitive.

1. On-Page Optimization: Isn’t that a fancy word? That’s at least a $10 word I think. Anyway, this means to take the keywords that you select, and to put them into the various pages of your site. You have to write titles and descriptions for each individual page of your site, then put those into the meta-tags, or invisible code of your web page. Those titles and descriptions are then what appears on Google or other search engines when your listing comes up. Usually it works best to select 3 primary keywords for each page, that are most relevant to that particular page, then write titles and descriptions using those keywords. You can also put keywords into what are called “alt tags,” which are tags associated with pictures on your page.

1. Link Building: Next it is important to build up links to your web site coming from other web sites. Google has said for years that they consider the number of links to your site to be the most important criteria in determining how well it ranks for any given keyword. I have been engaged in link building in various forms for about 7 years. Here are the most effective forms of link building that I have found:

1.  
   1. Press Releases: Write press releases about your company and then submit these to online PR sites, and post them to your blog or blogs. When you post them to a blog, include text links in the blog post that point to pages on your main site.
   2. Blogs: Post items regularly to your blog or blogs, and include text links linking to various pages on your main web site.
   3. Article Marketing: Write articles about your company topic and post these to article directories.

SEO people used to do what is called reciprocal linking, contacting other web site owners and offering to link to them if they’ll link to you. Google took steps to discount these types of links several year ago, so it is typically not done anymore, though I occasionally see companies still offering this or software being offered that is geared to this.

Panda

There has been a lot of discussion recently about Google’s algorithm update called “Panda,” which began in February, and there have been regular additions to it every couple weeks since then.

It appears that the intention of Panda is to make it so web site owners can’t do anything to improve their search engine rankings, and specifically to target article marketing, where you submit the same article to multiple article directories.

I have been silent on Panda up until now, other than discussing it with colleagues. First of all I will say that I don’t agree with the overall apparent intention to make it so web site owners can’t improve their rankings. I think this objective is something that is good for Google or makes things easier for them, but is bad for web site owners. Thus I will condemn it here in the strongest terms.

Second I’ll discuss whether this affects link building. I think it will affect link building in the coming year. But since I am doing link building for a number of clients using the actions listed above, I have closely monitored the effects, in terms of the only statistics that matter, namely number of links, keyword rankings and web site traffic.

For the clients that I am monitoring, I am seeing no adverse effects due to Panda, in terms of links, rankings and traffic. The above link building program is still working well and getting good results. Will we have to change it eventually? Yes probably. When the statistics indicate it. But in my opinion we have not reached that point yet.

With an overwhelming market share in terms of online searches, I believe Google has too much power. They hate people finding ways to “game” their system as they put it. But from my perspective, if, as a small business owner, you can’t find a way to be proactive or “cause” over your rankings situation, then you just have to sit there as total “effect.” Their philosophy seems to benefit entities that are already well established and known, but small companies that are just now starting to do SEO are just out of luck.

I don’t agree with that, and will continue to find the best ways for companies to be able to improve their rankings and be “cause” over their situations.

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Is Pay Per Click Advertising Still Relevant?

by John Eberhard

I was talking to a friend recently who is a salesman for a company similar to mine, and he told me that he is running into more people lately who have a negative reaction when he brings up pay per click advertising (PPC) on Google AdWords or MSN Ad Center.

I have been giving this some thought as to why this would be, and whether many people have given up on PPC. My theory on this is that PPC has been getting more and more competitive over the last few years, in that there are more people using it and that drives bids higher. So it makes PPC more difficult to do, especially if you’re managing it yourself or if you have a company “managing” it who only looks at your account every couple months.

What Companies Are a Good Fit?

There is also the factor of whether your company and product are a good fit for PPC advertising in the first place.

I have said in past articles that PPC works best for high ticket items, and let’s arbitrarily set that at say, $200 or more. If you are selling a book or a CD or some other similar low ticket item, pay per click advertising is not right for you. The reason for this is driven by the bid levels. Bids are driven by how many companies are competing for any given keyword.

Let’s say that the bid level for a keyword that you want is $1.00. That’s not unusual today. That means that every time someone clicks on one of your ads, you will get charged $1.00. The days when you could get a competitive keyword for 15 or 20 cents are long gone. I saw a book recently claiming to give the real skinny on how to do pay per click management and throughout it was talking about getting people to click on your ads for 5 to 10 cents. That just doesn’t exist any more so it really threw the whole “system” this guy was selling out the window.

From my experience managing many accounts over the last few years, PPC works extremely well for companies like home improvement, for example, where the average sale is in the thousands, and especially in cases where the product is something you really need and not a luxury item. It works well in health care, but there you really have to know what you’re doing because there is so much competition.

Conversions

The purpose of setting up a PPC advertising account is to drive in a steady flow of leads or sales to a business. In PPC terminology we call this a “conversion,” which is defined as someone who calls in from the campaign or fills out a form on the web site asking for more information, an appointment, etc.

It is vital with both Google AdWords and MSN Ad Center to set up what is called “conversion code” and put that on certain pages on your site. This allows the Google or MSN interface to track the number of conversions you are getting, and you can see which campaign, which ads, and which keywords your conversions are coming from. This also allows you to see what your cost per conversion is.

It is also a good idea to set up phone call tracking, so that you can know how many phone call conversions you are getting. There are a number of companies that do this, where a new toll free or local number is set up, that bounces to your phone number, and you put that number on your PPC landing pages. If you have multiple campaigns you can set up multiple numbers to track them all. Most of these companies can also record all the calls so you can review them later if desired.

Managing

The first task of managing a pay per click account once it is set up, is to get it to the point where it is producing a steady and viable flow of leads or sales. You have to select a budget for your account, and this has to be adequate to produce enough people clicking on your ad and coming to your landing page, so that a percentage will fill out the form or call and become a conversion.

If your average cost per click is $1.00, and your monthly budget is $100, that’s not going to produce very many conversions. I read somewhere that the average nationally for conversions for lead generation campaigns is 3%. So in the above scenario, with a monthly budget of $100, you are only going to get 3 conversions per month. So you have to select a budget that is enough to produce enough leads to make it worth doing.

With online sales, Ed Dale says that the average conversion percentage is 0.5%. So with 200 people clicking through to your landing page, you would get one sale.

With many keywords, the average bid, or cost per clickthrough, is much higher than $1.00. It depends on the industry.

Here are some general fixes for specific problems:

Low Impressions: Add more keywords

Good Impressions but Low Clickthrough Rates: Write new text ads and test them against your current ads. This is called an A-B test when you test multiple ads or landing pages against each other.

Good Clickthrough Rates but Poor Conversions: Look at your landing pages. If the conversions are poor your landing page is to blame. Write new copy, or come up with a new offer. Then put up one or more new landing pages.

High Cost per Conversion: Adjust your bids. Look for expensive keywords where you are getting high clickthroughs and spending a lot of money but getting no conversions. Pause those keywords.

Still Relevant?

So in answer to the question in the title of this article, is pay per click advertising still relevant today? The answer is – absolutely. As long as it is a good fit for your product or industry, PPC can produce a steady flow of leads or sales for your business.

But if you are managing it yourself and not getting any joy, before throwing your hands up in despair and turning your account off, have a professional PPC manager work on your account. And make sure he will actually manage your account weekly. I have recently run into people who had PPC managers who seemed to be asleep at the wheel and were not tracking what was happening with the accounts. One allowed the cost per conversion to double over the course of a year. Another was only looking at the account every other month.

A professional PPC manager can get the best possible results out of your account.

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