1. High Position Equals High Value
For high-end companies with ocean deep pockets looking to use the search engines as their own digital billboard, sure, it’s worth the price to pay and get into the top positions for your ppc keywords. But for most small businesses, the cost/benefit analysis will show that over the long term it’s not worth it to push yourself into that prime real estate when what you’re looking for is a significant quantity of quality traffic. That’s the key with setting up a lead generation campaign; finding how little you can pay to get into a good enough position on the first page to get you conversions. So definitely don’t shoot for the sky right off the bat. You’ll likely waste a lot of money before you find that the optimal ROI is further down the page.
2. More Keywords Equals Better Results
Yes, we’re all very proud that you know ten different ways to say “widgets,” but are they all common uses of the term? Is there the potential for any of them to get confused for a different product or service than what you’re offering? And most importantly, are they all the ways that someone who’s looking to pay money for your products and services would phrase things? When faced with questions like these, it’s clear that for your ppc lead generation campaign, you should think long and hard about your keywords. Less can always be more if you pick the right combinations of keywords and key phrases.
3. Don’t Need A Landing Page
Why design an entirely separate page to advertise an individual product or service to my ppc visitors when I’ve got a beautifully crafted home page to point them to? Well, that’s not always an easy question to answer. If you’re just running a branding campaign, then you’d obviously want your visitors all funneled towards the face of your website. And depending upon how you have your website set up, it can act as a landing page. The biggest issues that most home pages have is that they have a lot of navigation options that can make it easy for your visitor’s attention to drift from why you brought them there in the first place: to buy a specific product! Also, the buttons and links on home pages are often set up into directory-like categories instead of appealing calls to action. If you plan on using your home page as your destination URL, then ask yourself this question: Would this look good in print as an advertisement? If you’ve got too much Flash animation and a simple navigation scheme, without reinforcing the offer that you put in your text ads, then your home page definitely won’t optimize your lead generation campaign’s conversions.
4. I Only Need One Landing Page
Ideally, you should have a separate landing page for each of the specific service or products that you are offering. This gives you the opportunity to concentrate on the SEO of each page, and writing copy that makes you seem like an authority when it comes to that individual product or service. This in turn leads your visitor, who usually typed in a very specific key phrase to get to you, to find exactly what they are looking for on your page and nothing else to distract them/scare them off. If you’re going to have several products share a landing page, for heaven’s sake at least make sure the products are closely related. If you can come up with a catch-all phrase to sum up all of the products as a group then that’s the ideal way to set up a multi-product/service landing page for a lead generation ppc campaign.
5. Ad Scheduling Doesn’t Make A Difference
They’ll stumble out of bed in the middle of the night and type in something, anything. They’ll be up so late trying to figure out how to pay the bills next week that they can’t even remember what they were searching for. They’ll be killing five minutes while making dinner for the family, and their heart won’t be into making an online purchase at the moment. You should avoid having any of these people view your ads by utilizing the power of ad scheduling in your lead generation campaigns. Your ppc budget will thank you by having more money around to put towards people who are awake, on a break, and not temporarily financially crunched.
6. I Can Monitor Every Week And Be Okay
It’s only after blowing through tons of cash while your guard is down that you realize how fast the search markets can change. As much as you can use budgeting, scheduling, and just good old proper ppc campaign setup to your advantage, there’s no better way to make your budget work for you than to get involved with your lead generation campaign on a daily basis. Just a half an hour a day will not only let you make necessary ppc budget adjustments and try new text ad variations, it will also give you a bit of time to slowly chip away at the stuff you really need to be utilizing: analytics.
7. Text Ads Just Have To Get The Job Done
You’re the kid yelling out on the street corner selling papers. And you’re hungry. So is your family. You’d better think of something good to say, cause you’ve only got a couple seconds (if that), and you need to start putting some bread on the table. That’s the mind set you need to have when writing text ads, because if you just throw them together it will show. Well-constructed ppc ads have a polished look to them. Some of them grab attention visually. Others rely on great calls to action to motivate people to click on them. So experiment and find the style that works best for your business. And don’t blaze through writing them.. the results usually aren’t pretty.
8. I Only Need Keywords In My Ad Title
You shouldn’t just place Keywords in your ad title, and then say whatever you want in the rest of the ad. You should have keywords in the title, both description lines, the display URL and the destination URL. Just make sure that you word things so that it doesn’t sound like a random collection of keywords. And if you wanna be sneaky, you can always try some nifty tricks like creating shapes out of the keywords that are in bold when your ads serve. If there is a common keyword phrase that has three words to it you are bidding on, try putting one of the keywords at the beginning of the ad title, another at the end of the first line of the description, and another in the beginning of the second line of the description. What you’ve done, my friend, is create an arrow that leads the visitor to view your ad instinctively! And that’s the kind of creativity that will reward you with results in your ppc lead generation campaign.
9. One Campaign Is Easier
What’s easy rarely makes you rich. Now when it comes to a ppc campaign, you can’t settle for throwing all your keywords into one group with one campaign and expect to get the best bang for your buck. Not to mention you can’t even effectively track what types of traffic are getting you the best results. So if you’re a widget dealer throughout the southwestern U.S., set up campaigns for all your geographic targets. After you launch them all, you’ll notice which ones are flying out of the gate, which ones are keeping up, and which ones need you to pick them up off the ground (or bury them!). Also, you’re gonna get bonus points for setting up Groups for each specific product or service. That way you’ll know what your big sellers are. If you’re running a national campaign, you can use separate campaigns for your products instead of geographically targeting the campaigns. You get the same benefit: separating your product/service lines so you can evaluate what’s getting you the most out of your lead generation campaign.
10. Keywords Are Easy To Figure Out
You may think you know a lot about your target demographic, what they would search for, what’s gonna make you rich. Just stop with it already. You can’t possibly conceive of how rapidly the markets change. What might seem like a traffic gold-mine can be a term that no one in ten years would ever search for. So instead of thinking you know what’s your optimal keyword list and just going for it, do some homework with Google’s keyword tool, researching your competition, and reading a few more posts like this one before you start to structure your keyword lists to optimize the leads you generate through your ppc campaign.