These are my six steps to pay per click advertising success. I'm setting them out in order of sequence and not order of importance. To illustrate my points I'm looking to advertise a lawyer.
Purpose; You must begin by clearly deciding your objective. Every advertiser wants to sell something. Some are specific 'preparation of wills', others want traffic to their website or their business 'solicitors for family and small business matters', some want to draw attention to a promotion 'half price wills', many want to get noticed ahead of their competition in online searches. Pay per click can short cut search engine optimisation to a prominent position in search results. Knowing what you want will guide your strategy.
Placement; Where you decide to place your advertisement is important too. You might decide to place your advertisement with search results like 'legal services' 'solicitors', or on relevant pages of other websites like 'retirement planning', this is so called banner advertising. If you decide to go with banner advertising, then you can either rely on the advertising space seller to place them or you can select your own target sites and buy space on those. By far the majority select search result placement based on Key Words.
Position; For search result advertising the position achieved depends on several, perhaps surprising, factors. The first, and most obvious, is selecting the Key Words you wish to associate your advertisement with. The position result depends on how close the keyword match is and who else wants to advertise in the same place. The sellers of advertising space want to maximise their revenue and compare advertisers. It is not just a question of price per click. Some advertisements get a high click through rate, that is if 2 people out of every 100 that see the advertisement click then the click through rate is 2%. They get nothing until someone clicks and they favour those who get the best click through rates with lower prices and better positions. Crudely, search engine operators try to give searchers what they want, the most relevant information and the most enticing advertisements at the top of the front page.
Copy; Your results will vary, from success to failure, based on your headline and copy. An advertisement for 'Friendly Solicitor - 20 years experience Will writing' might do less well than, 'Half Price Wills - from experienced and friendly firm'. The objective is to get a high click through rate, a good position and a low cost per click.
Landing Page; Congratulations, you paid and your potential customer arrived. Now what, oops! Your customer 'bounced' because they did not like the page you bought them to. Your customer thinks 'I wanted a will written not a divorce or to move house, nor yet to buy a business - no wills here I'm going to look at another page'. The biggest mistake of pay per click advertisers is to bring people to the home page of their website. For pay per click success bring your customers to a 'landing page' written for them and the advertisement that just attracted them. If I want a half price will and I land on a page that has a clear headline 'half price wills' and has lots of information about the process the chances are I'll stay and read it.
Call to action; I've read the information and? I'm expected to find my way to 'contact us'. I don't think so, I'm off. At the end of the description ask the customer to order, by phone, by email, by chat session on the page, by whatever means ask them there and then. Call us now on 0123456789 we are only giving 50 wills at half price don't miss out, call us now for a warm welcome and early appointment.
It is amazing how predictable human behaviour is. These six steps can each be refined in a predictable way that allows businesses to work their way to low cost and effective pay per click advertising that provides fantastic returns on investment and much better results than competitors. It takes understanding, time and discipline based on the systematic collection of results. At the next level the best practitioners will apply split testing on small variations of each step to improve performance and gain both better results and competitive advantage.
An experienced author, Tim Meadows-Smith is a hands on investor in early stage and turnaround businesses. He works as a non-executive chairman, director, business advisor and mentor. Tim has a classical marketing background gained internationally with famous global brands. Reach Tim by email at Tim@Meadows-Smith.com further articles at http://www.timmeadows-smith.co.uk
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