Don’t Waste Your Money With PPC
Jul 29th, 2008 by msdanielle
I mean this in the most literal sense. After reading the book Web Design for ROI, I wanted to impress upon my readers the importance of creating a web site that converts positively before spending exorbitant amounts of money driving gobs of paid traffic which may or may not return the advertising investment. First and foremost, creating a site that converts “browsers into buyers and prospects into leads” should be the top priority, then scaling the site for volume traffic should follow.
The Foundation
Driving a herd of sheep to a cliff and expecting them to pass the crevasse without a bridge won’t work. Knowing this, it’s obvious that driving more sheep to the cliff would just be more sheep without a means to cross. The sheepherder must build the bridge first, and build it properly. Making sure there is an clear and present means to the goal is what conversion optimization is all about.
Think of optimizing for conversions as the foundation for all of your goals. As marketers, we don’t build web sites and drive traffic to them purely because it’s fun and we enjoy entertaining the thousands of faces we’ll never meet. For the most part, it’s about building a site that somehow earns money. Whether it’s through advertising, sales, leads, clicks, whatever. Sure, the site can be fun and entertaining, but getting a user to ultimately click where we want them to is the golden ticket.
Once your site begins to convert for whatever goals you’ve defined, keep a solid eye on your key metrics. As Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus of WD4ROI point out, make sure you’re measuring the right metrics. For example, for those of you affiliate marketers who are interested in lead generation, you may be keeping an eye on your lead volume, conversion rate, revenue from leads, cost per lead, and revenue per visit. Depending on the type of site you’re running, you may need to keep an eye on differing key metrics.
The Conclusion
Optimizing for conversions is an essential step that every site owner must take before driving volume traffic to the site if the goal of purchased traffic is to increase revenue. In other words, you can purchase smaller volumes of traffic (or go by natural search traffic conversion stats), test, and make sure your site is converting before turning up the knob on the PPC dial. It just makes cents.
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Good tips. So, where were you 18 months ago when it cost me $1,000 to make $700 with PPC?
i was making money for my boss … wah wah waaahhh =/
Welcome back from Japan…
Last night I gave my daughter her first PPC Google related task. Design some content ads, test for CTR, and beat Dad’s best CTR. Since she’s a recent graduate from Carnegie-Mellon I thought she would enjoy the task (and probably beat my old CTR for the ad).
And last night, I was already thinking that I should give my daughter a fun Google Optimizer assignment for a client of mine.
You’re right Danielle, Web Design for ROI is a very good book. And yes, optimizing a web page for conversion is a much better idea than driving tons of traffic towards a landing page that has never been optimized.
Thanks for the reminder Danielle. Send me an email if you have a minute (it’s for my daughter).
hi Richard, it’s great hearing from you. That’s a pretty cool little challenge that you gave to your daughter. so did she beat your CTR?
will send u an email tonight!
Hope my father did give me lesson about PPC. My father doesn’t even know how to turn on the computer
…Lucky is your daughter.
Good post, I am about to order that book now, following your previous recommendation
Will let you know how I get on!
Jez
Yes absolutely true ..i realized little later …
using ppc u can inc traffic but it wont stay for long term so there is no consistency for ur website which results low Pr And search rate
Landing Page Optimization is another good book. Many of the books are too general and will differ based upon the type of traffic you receive. Optimizing a page for SEM traffic might not fly if you one day you plan on running heavy email or display campaigns. Always know what percentage of your traffic is from different channels, and consider splitting your traffic to multiple landing pages– but at the same time, if you split it too much, you’ll never be able to analyze the data with any kind of mathematical confidence.
You also need some basic stats equations to plug into your excel to measure for significance (90% 95% and so on) if you plan on doing A/B testing to measure accurately which design iteration is better.
My daughter’s ad campaign…
We’ll never know if my daughter’s ad campaign would have beat mine.
I sent the ads to the client and the client didn’t like them. It was a disappointment to my daughter (Do they want to get more clicks or not?”).
But I turned it into a lesson. When PPC consultants like us play with “house money” on advertising, we should expect that the clients will intervene and pick and choose on the ads. I told my daughter it’s the client’s money and they get to chose.
She knew it and learned the concept quickly.
PS: My daughter’s still looking to apply or double major in Statistical Decision Making and Spanish in her first job in market research in the Chicagoland area. I’m biased, but let me say she’s incredibly smart and incredibly nice. If a reader has a job lead or network lead for my daughter, contact me at rkraneis@techspectrum.com.
Thanks everyone.
To be honest I’ve never fully understood the whole world of Adwords etc. I started a shoe blog for women who wear large-size shoes> about 2 1/2 years. I’m slowly buy surely building my readership and now earning approximagely $200 per month via affilliate marketing, adsense and a few others. There are just so many other ways to make money. It may take a little longer, but it can be done. More than likely I will never waste my money on PPC.
Fantastic article …pay per click is damn waste …Google easily detects and it may result to penalize ur site …bcoz no consistency