A Confession
Hello – My name is Kelley, and I use pay-per-click to help drive my business. And I’m okay with that.
I was also banned by Google, although I no longer wear the scarlet G.
Over the next couple of weeks, I’ve plans to talk a bit about my pay-per-click strategy on Google, using a system called AdWords, but I wanted to make a brief introduction and business case for using this kind of advertising before we dive into some of that content.
I don’t hear a lot of people in this industry talking about pay-per-click (PPC) as a marketing tool. Everyone wants you to work on your organic search engine rankings, optimize for natural results and whatnot – and this is a fabulous goal. But it can take some time. And if you’re new online, or were taken out of the Google index like I was, you’ve got mouths to feed in the meantime, yes?
Keeping Business Afloat
Having a clue what we were doing with AdWords is what kept my business afloat while we overhauled Housechick, resubmitted to the search engines, begged forgiveness, and waited to be reindexed. Because I do – and only want to do – a non-traditional business, spending money on paid search engine advertising is part of my business plan, it’s in my budget. The return on my investment is sufficient for me.
Here’s the part that most people don’t get: you can used AdWords in shorter term campaigns as part of testing your site to know what really works and doesn’t work, for your market and your desired audience.
Seriously, You Can See What Works
Can I repeat that? You can find out for sure what works and what doesn’t.
Not sure if adding a phone number to your registration form decreases registrations or not? You can drive focused traffic to registration pages with and without the phone number via AdWords and find out for sure.
Is your target audience more likely to click through your site or application if you lead with the fear of loss headline, or the warm and fuzzy one? Drive some traffic there, test the headlines with ad variations and two different landing pages, know for sure.
Or how about this – before you spend a bunch of time trying to optimize your site for keywords that you aren’t sure will drive visitors, how about running an AdWords campaign using variations of those words and phrases to see which keywords actually are used often and make visitors want to click? And then go optimize your site naturally for those words?
Next time – some vocabulary, account setup, and understanding how to pay less for the same clicks.
