To some extent, Google PPC and Facebook Ads are polar opposites. Google AdWords gives businesses access to audiences with high commercial intent, and enables you to understand their moods and attitudes by trial and error (how often do we go on about the importance of testing, testing and more testing when it comes to Google AdWords?!). You bid for keyword searches that you think will capture consumers surfing around who might be interested in your product, and the Google AdWords interface provides you with the option to bid for different combinations of search terms as frequently as you like.

For example, imagine that you sell used cars in Hampshire. Ideally, you would be able to bid for the search terms: used cars Hampshire, and win the top slot. This is a a combination of keywords like that is likely to have a high asking price. The price of search terms are dictated by the bidding process. Whoever is willing to pay the most, will often win the top slot, and appear at the top of the search in the ‘Ads’ section (although there are other factors, including the relevance of your landing page, the quality and relationship of the other keywords you are bidding on, your click through rate, the quality and relevance of your adverts…)

We refer to users entering search terms like ‘used cars Hampshire,’ as being pretty, ‘far down the cone.’ That is – from the number of possible people in your audience at the top of the cone, where the cone is widest, to the bottom of the cone where it narrows to where people are actually buying your product–people who are entering search terms to search for your product are probably already thinking about buying it. On the other hand, you are only reaching people who are entering the search terms that you’ve bid for.

Facebook Ads, on the other hand, are the opposite of this. You can choose your demographic with incredible precision–based on their ‘likes’–but you’re not necessarily reaching people who are already in the mood for shopping. Does that matter though? The small percentage of people who click on your ad are the only people who matter, and the conversions that you get from that small-percentage can be elaborately fine-tuned as your ad campaign continues.

What is exciting about these marketing tools is the instant level of feedback and data that advertisers have access to. Instead of researching how you should target and launch your ad-campaign through focus-groups or just raw intuition, and then waiting for results with your fingers crossed, with Google AdWords or Facebook Ads, you know exactly how your market is responding straight away, and as such you have the ability to constantly tweak, recalibrate, respond. Advertising along these lines is an art… but it’s also a science. If you watch the campaign diligently and learn how to react to the results, you can hardly fail to make an impact. And by ‘impact,’ we mean, ‘sales.’

If Google AdWords has you in a puzzle, or if Facebook Ads has taken all the fun out of Facebook for you, get in touch! We love nothing more than creating ad campaigns and seeing the conversions (sales, enquiries etc) roll in! Email us on info@SMEketing.com for more information or to arrange a quick coffee to chat it over.

PPC advertising, especially Google AdWords are a fantastic way of increasing the volume of traffic to your site. Many types of websites and businesses will benefit from PPC:

• If you have a new site which is not yet ranking well in the search engines
• If you’re in a very competitive market and don’t really stand a chance for ranking on your key terms
• If you haven’t got any optimisation on your site, so probably won’t rank for your desired terms

PPC is a great way of getting traffic to your site, but that’s only half the battle. Once someone clicks on your advert and lands on your website, what happens then? You need to carefully think about what your goal is for that visitor:

• Signing up for your newsletter
• Making a purchase
• Registering for an event
• Making contact via your ‘Contact Us’ form

Once you know what your goal is, you then have to think about how you’ll achieve that goal. This is where landing pages come in. A landing page, simply put, is the page that visitors ‘land’ on when they first enter your site. With PPC you have control over this (whereas in natural search it’s most likely to be your homepage, however other pages will rank also, but unless you’ve optimised a particular page for a specific phrase, it’s unlikely you’ll have much control over this).

Anyway, back to PPC where you can specify the landing page you want your visitors to land on. So what is the best page on your site to direct them to? You may think that your homepage is the best page – let the visitor click about and go to the content they want to see. But that’s where you’re wrong. The Internet has made us all lazy, demanding and impatient! We don’t want to have to search your site for the information we’re looking for – we want it presented to us straight away!

For example, if you’re selling bikes and have an advert running for the keyphrase ‘Ladies red bike’, when a searcher enters that term into the search box, they’ll get a list of natural and paid results. If they click on your advert…

Ladies Red Bike
Wide Range Of Bikes For
Ladies Who Like To Ride
www.yoursite.com

…where will they land? Do they land on your page featuring all your ladies red bikes, or do they land on your homepage? What makes more sense to you? If they can’t see immediately what they’re looking for, they’ll hit that dreaded ‘back’ button and click on another advert, and you’ve just been charged for a click with no result.

So it’s important that you direct people to landing pages that are relative to their search query.

Come back on Monday to find out what our top tips are for creating landing pages with conversions in mind; getting people to take the action you want. The more conversions you get, the better return on investment you’ll get from your PPC campaign.

In the meantime, if you’ve had any success using landing pages in your PPC campaign, leave a note in the comments telling us abou it! And remember, SMEketing are dab hands at creating high quality landing pages. If you’d like us to overhaul your PPC campaign and help you get more conversions, get in touch with us on 023 8083 7271 or email us on info@SMEketing.com.