HOW TO GET YOUR PPC & SEM ON THE RIGHT TRACK TO CREATE CONVERSIONS

 

PPC & SEM TECHNOLOGY POST by Gene Vann
INTERNET MARKETING (SEO) TECHNOLOGY BLOG

July 29 2015| Marketing post | Conversion Optimization

START CONVERTING CLICKS INTO SALES!
WEB MARKETING TECHNOLOGY POST DESIGNED TO HELP YOU WITH YOUR PPC, BANNER AND AND WEBSITE CONVERSIONS

Hello everyone, welcome. Lets start with a little about my SEO experience, before tackling the PPC & SEM conversion process. I have spent the past five years hands on SEO in the field and in college. I have real world experience from start to finish. From acquiring clients to performing the work for them. I have taken websites to the top of search results or hovered them mid page in search results. Some businesses prefer not to be at the top of first page in search results because smart searchers know being at the very top doesn't mean the answer to your question is there. They scan titles and page descriptions before clicking. We've found that on average the best results appear about mid-page as per search surveys of 2014.  

I will discuss the topic of search engine optimization and conversions often during these blogs, they are two of the hottest topics of today as many internet entrepreneurs are maturing to this stage of their careers. 

In the busy world of the online business person there are a lot of things grabbing at your attention. You're steady taking in tons of information on various subjects and projects. SEO requires you to wear a lot of hats. You don't get much time for researching peripheral responsibilities either.  

Responsibilities like learning more marketing sciences, and other details that directly effect the operating results of website projects you're responsible for optimizing will require all your time. While you're changing from hat to hat, link building, social media managing, search channel marketing, public relations, psychologist, researcher, and tech, people's desires, needs, likes and habits are steady evolving. 

What worked yesterday may not work today so you must evolve too. 

Welcome to SEO, also known as search engine optimization. There are various marketing channels and SEO applies to all of them. Today's channel discussion will be on PPC or pay per click campaigns. SEM or search engine marketing is a different channel but so closely related to PPC the same principles will apply to both.

With PPC you are paying a search engine to identify the appropriate sites suitable and relative in some way to your product and to broker deals with those website owners to advertise your product and spread word of your brand. Google brokers with websites using Adsense. Each time a visitor to one of these sites clicks on your ad banner you are charged according to your agreement (cost per click) with the search engine.  SEM is advertising right on the search result pages. You are charged when someone engaged in an internet search lands on a page relative to your ad. Based on your bid your add will appear on that same page so the internet searcher can see it. If they are interested and click on your ad, you are charged what you bid. Someone with a similar product as yours who made a higher bid for the same key words as you did will have their ad shown there instead of yours. 

This is one of a series of technology blogs I have planned and I will  be covering all aspects of digital or internet marketing as the weeks and months go by. Being a member of a vast network of Internet bloggers, Web marketers, digital marketing companies, Internet businesses, techs, and consultants I've amassed a respectable master mind. I am surrounded by experts of my trades and I am excited about bringing you new ideas, techniques and technologies as I learn them or as they are made known to me from within my networks.  And I am excited about using my reach to bring you useful, relative and authoritative information. So lets get started!

Pay Per Click (PPC) is one of many digital marketing channels retailers, and businesses build brand and create conversions by. Though building the brand kind of comes automatic for businesses and merchants due to sub channels that yield exposure i.e. affiliate marketers; turning this exposure into clients and sales is yet another level of internet marketing science to be learned. It is indeed a science and it is absolutely critical to your success. Why, because this science turns clicks into money. I can hear someone mumbling "yu gotta get the clicks first". True that, and we'll get to how to do that in a different segment. 

You're in business to make money and to do that you must make sales. Technologies have been emerging in recent years that deliver tools marketers can use to make their job easier and faster, but the tool is an aid only, nothing will replace marketing know how, because trends rule. We know a little more today about turning clicks into money than we did yesterday. If we are unconscious does life exist, is it real? If a tree falls in the woods but no one saw or heard it, did it fall, does it matter? Internet science is similar. 

If someone visits your site but clicked on nothing were they there, are they important, do you care sense they clicked on nothing? Well if enough trees fall, whether we saw or heard doesn't matter if one day the forest is gone. And the same applies to the internet. If someone visits your site, they were there, really there, just not physically. What are you going to do about it. What can you do about it? Your going to optimize your site. You're going to make your site appealing based on what you know about humans and human nature. 

Your going to motivate them, even though you're not there, your going to motivate them to click further into your site. And when you've led them to where you want them to be and see, you're going to have what it is you want them to see prepared to be materialized into their reality for them. For them to follow that they have to want it and for you to do that, you have know what they wanted and have it visualized for them. Then you have make it extremely easy for them to get it in their hands. The internet is virtual. It resides in space and occupies nothing. It's not a physical place you can stand on or in. You can't see touch or feel anything or anyone there in real time. So you have to make it look and feel real.  

Companies are emerging everyday with a better mouse trap. And professional marketers are constantly being provided with these new tools. But its important to know that now days you have to choose tools by channels, otherwise you may choose a tool that doesn't quite cover the full spectrum of the metric you're focused on. In other words, internet marketers have to work the magic I just described and more tools are coming each day that make it easier for them to do that. The Internet is a vast wonderland so we need computerized technologies to navigate it. Marketing tools give us the ability to make better guesses and more success at meeting our goals. 

Here's one example: if you have chair how do you bring some who is interested in buying your chair to your chair. It'd be easy just to scream chair but who's gonna hear you?So you'll need to describe what you you have with key words. But how many key words are there and how many minds think the same? Not many. So now what? I could write down: sit, rest, four legs, seat, chair but my minds gonna wonder when enough is enough and it can't really know that. But not a key word generator it knows. And a keyword generator is what? It's a computer. 

So what I'm telling you is use the tools available to you to complete the job. And that's never been more important than now in a society that depends on computers for everything. 

Quality of a tool, another very important aspect when choosing a marketing tool pretty much means how reliable is it in helping you make KEY decisions? As business person the biggest part of your job is making decisions. The more you know about a dilemma the better you are equipped to deal with it. Marketing tools equip you to deal with marketing dilemmas that occur on the internet. As a researcher I've learned a few tricks along the way. What the right questions are to ask is one of them. 

I've learned you can't know what the right questions to ask yourself are until you have considerable experience. And as you grow, new questions have to be asked which spawn more growth. 

All businesses struggle with conversion management; because like technology what people like and want changes. There's no sitting around waiting for things to happen in this business, you have to always be in flux. If something is not happening, you need get started making it happen. 

And, there's no guessing, you have to develop what works for you and your type of business in real time online by keeping track of what's working and what doesn't anymore. And that has a lot to do with your competition. But now there are some incredibly functional tools for the job. 

So first you have to know what you need before you can choose a tool that will be instrumental in helping you achieve your desired operating results buy informing you so you can make better decisions. Many useful tools are free, but of course getting into the best one's will require you pay a little something. 

So how do you get an ROI with PPC when most PPC campaigns end up costing more money than the campaigns make?  Here are a few things you can do to increase your chances of turning a pay per click campaign into a series of conversions. No. 1, be patient with the process. No 2. test, test, test. Nothing worth having comes quickly or easily. test you banners and note the designs that bring about clicks. 

You must run tests and document what works and what doesn't. No 3. Increase your knowledge of PPC marketing. I'll give you a bit of that in the next few sentences. No 4. keep track of what's going on, or not going on, so if you get confused you have some idea of what's going on. Any little thing you do or change makes a big difference either way, profit or loss in PPC marketing. So keep track. Use an outline or a spread sheet like Excel, segment you campaigns, watch them daily or weekly and note progress or a lack of progress. Don't change what is making progress, but experiment with what is not making progress. 

You cannot approach PPC guessing about any part of it. In fact this applies to all facets of virtual marketing. Each change you make should be carefully calculated, and target as close as possible best landing page design and wording to achieve desired results. You want cumulative positive results. Conversion snowballing in other words. You want an avalanche. Price, product, position, relevancy and content. 

Begin with your banner design, use a design known to be good at prompting clicks. How can you find this out? Easy, just closely examine the ones you yourself have clicked. What was it about that particular banner that got your click? Leave no details unnoticed. Determine what elements of that banner got you to click and design the same elements into your own campaign banners. 

PPC or Pay Per Click advertising is placement of your ad on a hosting site such as jimisound.com. The host provides a place for traffic to the ad, kind of like a store located on a busy blvd; better than one on the back of building facing an alley. People learn about your business through ad hosting sites. Many sites won't allow our ads on their site, so use what you can get. Just make sure that every minute of your marketing efforts are spent well and you'll get there, it may take a little time and few mistakes but you'll eventually get there.  

In return when somebody clicks the ad, the company that created the ad (you) pays the search engine that negotiated the placement of the ad to the host site. The search engine then pays the ad hosting site i.e. jimisound.com a percentage of the click yield. Maybe you bid or pay five cents for each click. The search engine takes three cents and pays the ad host two cents. Once more, not all clicks and payments are equal. And keyword values vary. The stronger the key word the more it will cost you to get and use it. 

Sites with high volumes of traffic generate more clicks but not necessarily more conversions. Again, getting clicks and getting conversions are two very different sciences.  

It all depends on traffic volume, and the know how in the company for producing the tools i.e. banners, independent product links, or html coupons and other techniques that prompt interest in the company's products. The company's marketing team, and other departments must think as one mind. That maximizes ROI. Individual departmental cooperation (thinking as one mind), the hosting sites knowledge of the products psycho-graphic make up relative to it genre, and associated display methods, or ad placement technique, and everybody involved can profit, including the customer by the matching product with interested buyers concept.  

That having been said:The key to ROI for the company that owns the ad is its landing page. 

That is the page that opens up when someone clicks the ad. It is the page's design and the designers knowledge of human nature; how that particular product should be profiled, and their understanding of the psychologies in the purchasing decision process concerning that type of product that can make the difference from a click to a conversion. 

There are also other selling sciences i.e. where on the page to place the product based on the natural direction of eye movement relevant to page content, color coordination, pop-up coordination (timing), demographic targeting, and key text relevant to product or company. Display features, and well you get the idea. There's a lot to successful Internet marketing, and it's a team effort.  

PPC and SEM are highly dependent upon keywords. They determine where and when an ad should be displayed. Googles Keyword Planner found in Webmaster Tools is probably the best free tool out there in general, although I've had the pleasure of using some pretty powerful proprietary PPC dashboards that really worked for me.  Adwords is Google's PPC campaign initiation site and there's a nice functional dashboard that you can use to manage your ad campaigns. Try it.   

Most major search engines and many private sites provide keyword planners, word generators, and phrase generators. Googles Adwords program is probably the most widely used PPC program tool. Once more, the key to PPC campaigns is keeping track of what's going on within them. 

When you start tracking from the beginning and analyse what trends and keywords are producing the best results you will be able to improve the campaign as required, but if you don't you'll just leak money like a water from a bucket with holes in it. 

Combining your PPC campaign with SEO and organic search results is probably that best way to get the most relevant people traffic to your product and of course conversions. It has a greater call to action. Your business is amplified on the organic search results pages. Use ad extensions right after your primary ad line such: as "sign up and get an immediate $50 off coupon to use anywhere on the site". 

Last but not least is your ad budget, only increase it when you know the increase has already been paid for buy measurable increases in a previous sales period, quarter etc. If you can compare with same time last year, that's even better. 

If you want to advance your progress 'Semrush' remembers what you fail to remember and knows what you don't. With it you can take charge of your SEM/PPC search engine marketing. Its a good SEO tool that puts you in charge of your SEM/SEO work while helping you stay one step ahead of your competition. PPC is SEM or "search engine marketing. 

More and more marketers are looking for tools that simplify tedious but essentially important root work, giving them a reliable outline to follow while providing competitive data which gives them an edge. 

Successful eCommerce operations use this type of  tool as well as other businesses, bloggers, and so do I. They save me labor while at the same time aid me in getting desired results faster. They cut down on what otherwise would be tedious time consuming routines and I love that. I just don't have time to get caught up in it like that. The time just goes by too quickly. I need to diagnose repair and move on. Was this helpful? Did provide any answers for you?  

Alright that does it for this segment. Remember a firm commitment to landing page optimization, good SEO and you should start raking in some cash from happy customers with your PPC & SEM programs.
See you at the next SEO blog coming the week of 8/15/2015 
Best regards, 
Gene

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