Are The Pay-Per-Clicks Paying You?
by Steve Shaw

Get the Full Details on Starting an PPC Account

Using PPCs (pay-per-click engines) to get visitors to your
web site can be a very effective way to drive traffic to
your web site and increase your profits.

If you do it right, the profits you receive will far out-
weigh the costs.

But if you do it wrong, you can end up spending a lot of
money for zero profit.

This article demonstrates the correct way to use PPCs for
maximum benefits and high profit levels for your web site.

There are three golden rules for using PPCs effectively,
and this is in common with all online advertising - track,
track and track.

Seriously, you need to track absolutely everything
scrupulously. You need to know exactly how many sales, and
therefore how much profit, each link from the PPC generates
for your business. This is the only way to know whether a
particular keyword is bringing you a profit or not.

You'll need some software to help you do this. The software
I personally use allows me to set up any number of tracking
links (eg. one for each keyword in each PPC), and for each
one I can see detailed statistics on click-throughs, sales,
and even 'actions' such as subscriptions.

It gives me detailed reports on which campaigns are
profitable, tells me what my ROI (return on investment) is
on particular campaigns, and even allows me to do split-
testing by sending traffic to differing URLs.

This allows me to maximize the effectiveness of all my PPC
expenditure (and I can use it for all my other tracking
purposes too).

Get the Full Details on Starting an PPC Account

It's fairly unsurprising that different keywords and
keyword phrases can have a huge difference in the number of
sales they generate, and therefore their profitability.

Perhaps more surprising is the fact that different PPCs can
bring you very different results even when you are using
the same keywords.

This only underlines how important tracking is for your
business. To use PPCs for the maximum profits, you simply
focus on the profitable campaigns, and stop those that
aren't profitable.

But tracking is only one side of the coin - you also need
to maximize the profitability of every click.

One way to do this is to try to capture the details of as
many of your visitors as possible, via the use of popups
(with certain exceptions) and subscription forms on your
web page, with proper incentives for your visitors to hand
over their name and email address to you.

This not only means you can follow-up with them in order
to drive more sales home; but you are also increasing what
can be a very targetted and therefore profitable list, and
you'll be able to make other targetted offers to them in
the future.

If you have popups on your site normally, and are using,
or you intend to use, Google Adwords or other PPCs where
popups are not permitted, the easiest way to remove the
popups just for these particular PPCs is as follows:

- Copy your main page (eg. 'index.html') and save it as a
separate file (eg. 'index_nopop.html')
- Remove all trace of popup code from your new page
- Send the PPC traffic to this popup-free page

And remember, it doesn't matter if popups are elsewhere on
your site, the only restriction with PPCs like Google is on
the page that the visitor arrives at (the 'landing page')
after clicking on the PPC link.

This means that you could also use a technique where the
landing page is just a teaser page for the main site,
containing some information directly related to the ad, but
its primary focus is to encourage visitors to click through
to your main site, where of course you can use popups as
normal.

Get the Full Details on Starting an PPC Account

Another option would be make lead generation the primary
objective of the landing page - try using a mini sales page
that simply invites visitors to leave their name and email
address, rather than trying to directly sell them anything,
and then direct them to your actual sales page via your
follow-up messages.

In brief, to maximize your use of PPCs, track carefully,
and maximize the value you get from visitors that do click
through - remember, you're paying for them to visit your
site, and it's up to you to recoup this investment and make
it work for you.

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