Using paid search can really give your website that boost it needs to break through your previous online success. While organic search may prove to be more fruitful in the long run, if you’re looking for more immediate improvements and return on your investment, PPC and paid search options are the way to go.
But before you jump right into a PPC campaign, it’s vital that have all your ducks in a row. To help make sure you’re ready to bring your PPC campaign to the masses, here’s a checklist to complete before pushing your ads.
- Perfect Your Landing Pages
If the landing pages where your users will be sent aren’t perfect, you might as well not even be sending users there. Your landing page is likely the only page a visitor will see when they click on your ad.
For this reason, it has to be perfect and accomplish your goals flawlessly. To create a supremely optimized landing page to send your PPC ads, Salar Salahshoorm, contributor to Moz.com, gives six vital tips. These include drawing the eye to the right place, showcasing testimonials, matching your headlines with the intent of your content, having clear calls to action and more.
By including all these aspects on your PPC landing page, your visitors should know exactly what they are doing on your page and what action they should take next, boosting your conversion rate.
- Understand Your Budget
If you’re not careful, a PPC budget can get out of hand quickly. What you want is to find a balance between having an efficient campaign and having the maximum value for the clicks you’re getting from your ads. However, finding this balance is easier said than done, especially if you’re running a seasonal business.
To help you figure out if your PPC budget is too low or too high for your industry and area, Matt Umbro of MarketingLand.com suggests for businesses to think holisitically about budgeting their PPC. He advises to look at numbers like their spend, revenue, cost per conversion, and return on investment to ensure that your budget is correct.
This will vary for every business, so take the time to understand your company’s finance with regards to PPC budgets before you begin your campaign.
- Set Up Your Google Analytics Correctly
Without the proper tracking set up in Google Analytics, you’ll never have an accurate picture of how your PPC campaigns are working. And if you can’t tell how successful or unsuccessful your efforts are, you’ll never be confident making tweaks to improve your ads.
According to PPCHero.com, the most important parts in Google Analytics to ensure are tracking correctly are conversions, analytics tagging, URL tagging and goals. All of these will make it easier to feel confident that your campaigns are functioning properly.
Beginning to use PPC can seem daunting. But if you’ve done your due diligence for preparing your website, analytics, and finances for this endeavor, you can see a great return on your investment. Best of luck!