Article #1:

Tracking Conversions Of Your PPC Campaigns To Boost ROI
by: Ivana Giardi

Conversion is the most important metric of the online advertising. The term conversion refers to converting from leads to customers or users of your service. So if someone clicks on your ad and buys something on your site that click has been converted into a sale.

Conversion tracking is extremely useful because it enables you to accurately track how many clicks from your ads resulted in sales which will help you to determine your return on investment (ROI).

Advertising should be considered as an investment into your business growth. For an investment to be effective, it needs to generate measurable positive results — without positive ROI, advertising represents only cost to your business.

With a proper conversion tracking in place, you will be able to track your sales and calculate your ROI. There are many easy to use, affordable tracking tools to monitor and analyze your campaigns performance. (Apex Pacific, for instance, offers Dynamic Site Stats, a Web-based tool that monitors the performance of your website in real time and helps you improve the effectiveness of your online marketing campaigns.)

By using website tracking tools and their reports, you can accurately track which ads and keywords result in sales. This will help you to determine and eliminate poorly performing advertising campaigns. It also tells which ad campaigns you should focus your energy and resources on to further perfect their performance.

For example, Live Cost Analysis report available in Dynamic Site Stats, provides you real-time insight into the effectiveness of your paid search (PPC) campaigns. It pulls together dynamic price information from the leading PPC search engines (Google, Overture, FindWhat, Espotting, etc) with the revenue earned on your website so you can measure the profitability of each keyword.

Live Cost Analysis offers you clear, concise and actionable reports on which campaigns, keywords and search phrases are bringing you the most new customers, and which keywords are the most effective at driving qualified customers.

Analyzing statistics from the Life Cost Analysis reports will give you the information you need to improve your ROAS (return on advertising spend). Reports enable you to see a number of actions and cost per action (CPA), which will help to evaluate your campaign and/or keywords performance.

Improving the conversion performance of campaigns and keywords that are returning a lower overall ROAS will have a positive impact on the effectiveness of your website and the value of your product offerings as well.

In conclusion, conversion tracking reports offer great help to effectively monitor and analyze ad campaigns and keywords performance. This way you are able easily identify areas of low performance and optimize these accordingly to achieve the maximum ROI of your advertising budget.

About The Author

Ivana Giardi is Marketing Director for Apex Reach division of Apex Pacific, a complete Internet marketing solutions provider.

http://www.apexreach.com

http://www.apexpacific.com

http://www.dynamicsitestats.com

marketing@apexpacific.com

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Article #2:

Is Your PPC Or Adwords Campaign Crashing On The Landing Page?
by: John Krycek

What is a good landing page? The crucial half of a PPC campaign most people don’t know about.

Google Adwords, Yahoo (formerly called Overture Sponsored listings) and other Pay Per Click (PPC) companies give you the chance to get your ad or search listing at the top of the pack, right up front and perfectly matched to the searcher’s query. With a clever and catchy, attention grabbing ad or headline you can win the viewer in that critical split second he has to decide to click.

He clicks, you score! Right? WRONG! If you can get that click on a focused, targeted keyphrase and ad headline, you should feel very good. You’re halfway there. But, where does he land? On your home page? On the specific product page if you have an online store?

The page where the viewer lands is called a “landing page” or “destination page.” It is equally as important as your ad headline and copy, if not more. Most sales, conversions, or leads that cost hard cash to Adwords or Yahoo are often lost because of poor, or non existent landing pages.

Why can’t I just send my adword clicks to my Home page?

You can. But what if you walked into a five-story department store with no sales people– You’re looking for a very specific sweatshirt with a Penn State Logo that you saw at a football game. You know the sports shop out in the mall will have it, but you’ve got a store credit card so you’d like to get it here. You’re also holding onto two toddlers who are losing their cuteness very quickly because they want the Happy Meals you promised on the way home.

So there you are in an endless sea of perfume counters. You want a sweatshirt. Maybe it’s in the men’s section…but where is that? Or maybe it’s in Active wear… would that be with the men’s stuff? And where are the escalators?!

“Forget it,” you think, and walk out to the sports shop in the mall, buy your sweatshirt and are on your way to Micky D’s in less than 10 minutes.

Your homepage is the department store. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling a product, service, or giving away free information. You have sections and categories which are probably very well marked and labeled.

However, your Google Ad or Sponsored listing was specific. It advertised a precise thing in about 70 characters or less. People don’t care about your home page. They expect to see what they were searching for as soon as they click. Don’t you?

So let’s say your ads lead to specific destination pages of your site. What’s on those pages?

Destination Page Overview

For Pay Per Click, your destination pages are absolutely critical. They are the second half of the sales pitch. Just having the adword or PPC land on the product page is not enough. First, you have to get someone to your site.

Remember the number of hits you get on a PPC or Google Adword is an ever-increasing expense if you don’t turn that click into a sale and the only sales person you have is the page at the end of that click.

You’ve got to convince someone quickly, “at a glance quickly,” why they should buy from you and not the ad above or below you. Think of your own web searches. You have seconds to entice that viewer to read more, or lose them.

Build the page around a SINGLE goal incorporating:

• Well written content describing in clear detail what you are offering

• Organization to make a fast read or “scan” of the page convey as much information to the viewer as possible. Use bullet points and straightforward language to make reading as easy as possible

• Show the benefits to the potential customer. Details that the viewer can relate to on a personal, even emotional level are what makes this page have a much better chance of getting a lead, conversion or sale. It must show all the properties that make you better than the rest. Don’t be arrogant, but make the reader feel they will be secure, better and confident if they buy, fill out a form, or perform the action you’re after.

• KISS- “Keep it simple, stupid” applies here too. If you don’t need a country and a phone number in your form, keep them off. Make it easy and simple for your viewer.

Remember, when you land on a page, you ask “WHAT’S IN IT FOR ME?”

Destination Page Construct

• The first step is to provide the viewer with what he’s looking for immediately. Next, show him the features of the product.

• Most importantly, what is the benefit to the potential customer? Why should he buy from you? What will he gain by buying from you?

• If you’re selling a product that is very similar to other competing products, you need to focus your sales message on what makes your product unique. What are the unique benefits for your customer?

• Anything that can steal focus from your objective risks losing a conversion. This includes other products, details not related to the main idea, and even the navigation system you use throughout your site. Don’t give the viewer the option to go anywhere else but to a form, buy button or call to action.

• Each destination page should have a single, obvious goal that gently tells the customer what to do. Don’t try to cross sell or sign up for a newsletter and send an e-card. Stick to one goal.

• Some people might be looking for the specific product and buy from you. But for those that are questioning and/or first time buyers, don’t give them a chance to question your credibility.

•The phone number and email address should appear (not obnoxiously)enough times that they’re always visible when the page is scrolled. It’s a proven fact, if someone has to search for how to contact you, you lose some potentials.

Destination Pages and the Unique Selling Proposition

A concept developed in 1961 still holds merit today and is a great check for the underlying tone of your landing page. That is the “Unique Selling Proposition” by Rosser Reeves. The concept explains how every company should strive to show how it differs and surpasses its competition.

It consists of three concepts that should be applied to your advertisement (or adword) and your destination page.

1. Tell the consumer what benefits you will be giving him. ? “Buy this product, and you will get this specific benefit.”

2. The benefits have to be unique to your product. Something that separates you from what the competition has to offer. If your products are sold by competitors too, find something that distinguishes YOUR company.

3. The proposition must be so strong and convincing that it can move the millions (attract new customers).

To be successful, you’ll need to research and build a campaign, then watch and modify, test and retest different changes, words, prices, etc. I want to stress the importance of this.

The same testing, observing, tracking and revising apply to landing pages as they do to ads and headlines themselves. It can save you a lot of money. If you’re not careful you can run up thousands of dollars in PPC and adwords with insignificant sales or leads.

About The Author

John Krycek is a creative director at theMouseworks.ca Toronto Web and Full Service Internet Marketing Studio. Learn about search engine optimization and internet marketing, in easy, non-technical, up front English at http://www.themouseworks.ca.

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Article #3:

How To Maximize Your PPC Campaign
by: David Bell

Do you have any idea how much money you are throwing away on your Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising? Do you know which keywords are converting into orders? Do you know your advertising (conversion) cost per order?

If your answer to any of the above questions is no, then you’re probably throwing away from 20% to 80% of your budget every month. This is money that you can save by tracking the conversions and associated costs of each keyword. The good news – there are several tools available that can help you track your cost, right down to the keyword. Most PPC advertisers can now significantly reduce their cost per acquisition. In some cases you could throw some of that money back in and increase the number of closes as well. The key is refining your campaign by focusing only on the words that convert into orders.

Tracking Conversions

Several companies have now developed the technology to track the conversions and associated costs of each keyword. Some of these companies include: www.keywordmax.com, www.gotoast.comand www.google.com (for their own PPC advertising). By knowing which words convert into orders, you can eliminate the rest and save those wasted dollars. In addition, there are other words that cost too much for their conversions, again wasted money. Take the money you are saving and direct it only to the words that deliver… or, you can send half of it to me.

This methodology yields a refined campaign where each word is justified by resulting in orders. It typically takes a few months to gather enough data to analyze. However, during that time it will become very evident which words are delivering the best. After a few months you can analyze the entire campaign and make major changes. These changes will yield a significant improvement in your cost and quantity of acquisitions.

Get rid of it

We are inundated with statistics. There is the CTR (click through rate), Clicks per day, conversion ratios, CPC (cost per click) … just to name a few. Forget them … don’t ever look at them again… they’re all (almost) worthless. If you’re like most of us, we spend several hours a month analyzing the statistics and trying to come to a reasonable conclusion, only to be more confused.

There’s only one statistic that has any real meaning… What is your cost per order? That’s it! Do you really care how many clicks you got for a specific keyword? Who cares? If that keyword doesn’t deliver an order… GET RID OF IT! Don’t get enamored with how cool it is to be in the #1 position if that word doesn’t deliver orders… GET RID OF IT!

Keywords are King

I typically launch campaigns with hundreds of keywords. Since your orders are directly related to people clicking on certain keywords, it’s essential to have many relevant keywords. It’s amazing how many “order producing words”, I found using keyword mining tools. You cannot imagine all of the combinations that people use… many of which become your best words. Consequently, the more relevant keywords you have, the more orders. There are several tools available to help you mine for keywords including Google, Overture, and Wordtracker.

Many of you will be surprised to find the old 20/80 rule also holds true here. 20% of your keywords deliver 80% or more of the orders. I’ve seen campaigns where 5% deliver 100% of the orders. Can you imagine how much money is being thrown away? By the time you’re finished eliminating the words that don’t deliver, you will be down to just a handful. Finding new productive words is the key to scaling your campaign.

Start Saving NOW!

By using the above methodology, you can now create new campaigns or refine existing ones and find out within 30 days if the campaign is delivering. The process includes; finding hundreds of keywords, placing the words on Google and/or Overture, and tracking each click. Within 30 days you’ll be able to:

(1) Analyze the words that convert

(2) Know the conversion cost of each word

(3) Begin to save thousands of dollars

I hope this helps in your future marketing decisions.

About The Author

David Bell
http://www.wspromotion.com/
Advertising research and development center