GM Simmons Co
PO Box 32012
Jacksonville, FL 32237
(904) 645-7981 email
The Most Common Problem with Pay Per Click Campaigns
Recently, someone asked a question in one of the Online Forums I frequent that went something like this: “What is the biggest mistake someone can make when starting out with Pay Per Click?” To me the answer is simply attempting send all your traffic to one particular page (usually the homepage) on your site.
Let’s look at this from both an Pay Per Click campaign set up incorrectly and correctly. First let’s look at one that is typical, but unfortunately not set up right (and wasting a lot of money).
Let’s say your ad is about a debt reduction program and the keyword that this person typed in was “get out of debt”.
She see’s your ad and it catches her interest, maybe it’s exactly what she’s looking for. So she clicks on the ad and is taken to the homepage of your website. Your homepage is all about your company, what you do, and how you do it. She’s confused, she thought that this was going to show her how to get out of debt.
Instead, it shows who you are. What you do. Maybe even where you are and where you work. Anyway, nothing about helping her get out of debt.
Does she stay on your site searching for the information she’s looking for? No. Studies show that within 5 seconds if the visitor does not see EXACTLY what she was looking for, she hits the back button and your gone-forever. In the world of Pay Per Click it also means that you’ve just wasted whatever that click to your site cost you.
Why this happened is simple, when you set up your campaigns you failed to put yourself in the shoes of your visitors. You must understand how the relationship between the keyword---the intent of the search—the ad—the landing page—the offer must fit together in one cohesive manner. The closer you are to matching those individual aspects with each other, the better your chances of a conversion.
At the very heart of that, is making sure that the ad, keyword and landing page match as close as possible.
Taking the example above, let’s look at how it would work had the campaign been set up correctly in the first place.
The searcher see’s your ad , and since it really matches what she is looking for also catches her interest. Because it’s such a close match, she clicks on it to see if it answers her question or helps to solve her debt problem. She’s taken to a page where the headline is “10 Simple Ways to Eliminate Debt from Your Life”. Wow, this is exactly what she was looking for, so she reads your information-about eliminating debt.
All of a sudden, you have a person who has gone from mild interest to red hot “tell me more”. You’ve delivered her to the information she needed. Your chances of getting her to request more information or even buy a product, is greatly increased.
If you remember always, in the world of Google-relevance rules. The more you match what you do with what people want, the better your results will be.
Recently, someone asked a question in one of the Online Forums I frequent that went something like this: “What is the biggest mistake someone can make when starting out with Pay Per Click?” To me the answer is simply attempting send all your traffic to one particular page (usually the homepage) on your site.