Pay per click can take a lot of finessing to get right. What words are you going to spend your hard-earned money or ad budget on? There’s a lot that goes into running a successful paid search campaign, and it’s becoming an increasing critical investment for businesses. Your advertising budget is going less to brochures and paid ad slots on TV and more into paying for space on Google’s first page.
Like all ad spend, pay per click investments can be a gamble. Will you see more money at the end than you put in? That’s the goal, but there are a lot of factors that go into a successful campaign. Picking the right keyword to bid on is one part of a complex strategy to ensure more people see you, buy your products or services, and grow your business. Here’s what you should ask yourself as you select the best keyword for your pay-per-click campaign.
What metrics are you trying to bolster?
In other words, what are your goals? When you invest in pay per click, are you trying to get more eyes on your new website or entice your existing audience to click “buy” or “schedule an appointment?” Are you a dealership that wants to increase foot traffic or a B2B supplier who wants to usher in business before a big rush?
Your goals are your metrics. Before, during, and after your campaign, you’re going to measure increases in web traffic, foot traffic, sales, or whatever your end goal is. These goals are also how you’re going to select your keywords. Let’s say you have a dirt bike in your dealership. Dirt bike season is coming to a close, so you’re preparing for a massive Labor Day sale to make more sales and transition from dirt bikes and jet skis to snowmobiles for the winter. Naturally, you want to sell your dirt bikes. You’re probably going to bid on keywords like the make and model of the bike or even something as simple as “dirt bikes near me.”
Measuring results
For analog metrics like foot traffic or in-store purchases, finding the right pay-per-click keyword can be a little harder. Measuring your keyword’s success isn’t as easy as looking at analytics. Therefore, you’ll have to be creative in finding which keyword to invest in.
A survey is one way to measure a page’s success outside metrics. Put a survey in your office and on your social media pages asking if people have heard of your sale or your new blog or webpage and if so, which one? It can be tricky to have customers tell two similar pages apart, so either find a way to differentiate the design for the sake of the test, or ask them point blank which words they put in the search field. Since this can be hard to remember, you may have to keep getting creative regarding the survey.
Cost Per Click
Unfortunately, cost per click can affect the keywords you bid on. It’s no stretch to understand why more popular keywords cost more to bid on. Just like an auction, the higher people bid, the more it will cost to play. Therefore, picking a similar keyword that’s less expensive, it could be worth going with that keyword.
The problem here is by going with a less popular, but similar keyword, could diminish your reach, affecting your real goal with pay per click: create an amazing return on investment. If you invest $1,000 into a PPC campaign, but it only brings you $1500 in sales that’s not a great ROI. If you only spend $500 and your ROI is $1,200, that’s less coming in, but the difference is better. And the difference is what goes into your bottom line at the end of the day.
Here’s our bottom line:
You need to work smart, not hard, when it comes to pay-per-click. We don’t need to tell you that your goal when it comes to putting money down is to invest some now to bring in more than you spent. It can take years to master the formula, and even then, when it comes to the internet, the rules are always changing.
In order to get it right, there will be a lot of trial and error. This can take some time to get right. Luckily, there are services out there that can find the right keyword and do the right testing to ensure your bottom line grows – not shrinks – because of a pay-per-click investment.
Rather than finessing through search engine algorithms to ensure you turn a profit, leave the pay-per-click to the pros. Call us today and see what we can do for you.