How to beat the opposition with PPC

You MUST, MUST, MUST understand your customers’ search behaviour. Imagine being in the customers’ position and understand the dialogue they have with the internet. You have two types of customer, the first are looking to buy a specific product whilst the others are researching or looking for a problem to solve. You aim is to understand what problem they’re trying to solve by anticipating the keywords and phrases they will enter into the search engines.  Once understood you can provide them with a very focused solution to the problem with a specific landing page and a call to action to purchase your product or service.

What do you need to do?

• Decide how you will track success. Often this is easy…it’s when you make a product sale, other times it can be harder to spot. If you’re a selling high value services, you’ll most likely be tracking leads and not sales.
• Decide how to assign a monetary value to leads so you can determine how much advertising to spend in order to get it.
• Do the keyword research.  Identify the core ones and include people outside of the business, look at the advertisers who already show on the results and then use other tools to expand this core list.
• Build focused landing pages. You may want different potential customers to go to different pages within your site. This is often the case to enable you to highlight the different value propositions to solve their particular problem.
• Set up your adwords campaign using the keywords and landing pages.
• Monitor and test; use split testing, adjust bids and remove non-performing keywords …EVERY DAY.
• Then SWITCH! As soon as a great term is found that returns a high value you must start the search engine optimisation (SEO) process for that term so you get natural or organic search engine results (SERPs). Over time you can then reduce the PPC ads on that term and put your money into finding the next winner.

This probably looks complicated and overwhelming. However, if you know what you’re doing you can get a good return on any investment. Praeparo can help and with just a bit of effort on your part, you can beat the opposition.