Come for the Ride!

This is a follow up to one of our earlier post regarding startup PPC campaigns. If you’re a startup looking to pay for a quick boost to your traffic – realize that paying for a boost in traffic doesn’t necessarily mean a boost in sales. Many startups I’ve talked to throw money into PPC without ever testing key performance indicators. If you sell something online and you setup PPC without setting up the conversion tracking tags, then you basically just setup a FAIL campaign.

So in part one of this series, here are five things you could/should test.

Conversion tags – Before you even do anything related to setting up a paid campaign, you should already have conversion tags telling you how you’re doing.  Setting up something as simple as Goals in Google Analytics will at least tell you how many conversions you are getting a day and where the referrals generating the conversions are coming from.  Use this as a base line in figuring out what kind of goals you want to achieve with the paid campaign.

Keywords – Obviously, keywords are an important part of any pay-per-click campaign that needs extensive testing. However, you’d be surprised at how many people just buy up every single keyword related to their niche.  The thing with keywords is, you want to buy the ones that convert with a positive ROI. Your more generic words may drive the most traffic and may convert the most sales by volume, but if your product cost $39.99 and it takes you $60’s worth of clicks on that term to generate one sale, then you won’t last too long in the PPC game.

Keyword Match Types – If you are getting into pay-per-click, you should know intimately what keyword match types are. If you are unfamiliar with match types, ask around or outsource your campaign setup.  Do NOT setup a campaign without knowledge in this area.  In the tier one PPC engines, the primary match types are broad match, “phrase match” and [exact match].  You can think of broad match as massive fishing nets helping your site catch visitors you want and visitors you don’t.  Phrase match is a more specialized net/cage where you’re more likely to catch the right type of visitors with the right bait.  You end up with less overall volume, but the visitors you attract are more relevant.  Exact match is pretty much like spear fishing.  Very low volume (compared to broad match) but chances you are targeting exactly who you want to catch.

Negative Keywords – Negative keywords are gems that are often not found in amateur campaign setups.  However, these keywords will help you save a TON of money.  One easy way to spot negative keywords: do a search of a top term you want to pay for and see what results show up.  If a lot of unrelated results populate the top ten, start adding their names or related terms into your negative keyword list.  For example, if you only  want to sell “cherry coke” and nothing else, possible negative keywords for you would be pepsi, diet, classic, fanta, sucks, formula, history, merchandise, etc.

Dynamic Insertions – This is a tricky one but I wanted to include it in here cause it’s related to keyword testing in the ad. The idea behind dynamic keyword insertions is that if you show an ad with the exact phrase the user searches on, the likelihood of that user clicking on your ad will be much higher than other ads that have titles that only paraphrase the search.  eBay is a great example of a company that buys up every keyword in the dictionary and use dynamic insertions.  Can you really buy irony from eBay?  Who knows… but it was a term that used to pop an eBay ad.

Before you get into testing dynamic insertions, I would master the other four areas mentioned above.  Dynamic insertions will help you spend money (fo shure) but unless you know what your profitable words and phrases are, it’s hard to test this plus the keywords without some type of control.  Narrowing your profitable words THEN testing different ad copies will ensure you don’t pollute your results.  The next time we continue discussing PPC, I’ll go into some other areas of testing.