In the first part of this article, Ian Jarrett, Account Director at Pinnacle asks why more companies don’t fully understand Pay Per Click (PPC) on Google and how they could improve results from PPC.

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PPC the customer journey: driving for instant or more effective conversions.

There can be no doubting the success Google ad words campaigns can deliver.  For companies who want to feature high on Google and capture live search leads, it is proving a very profitable way of cost effectively advertising and capturing sales leads for instant conversion.  However a large majority of companies that undertake campaigns are not seeing the ROI that they desire from this. So why is this? Well it boils down to the fact that only half of the customer journey with PPC is being completed.  Basically the customer starts out on the journey but gets dumped into the ocean and is lost forever. To many companies forget about a vital link on the road to generating a decent return on investment with PPC campaigns.

 

The opportunity

With PPC the opportunity to instantly convert clicks to sales is huge.  The searcher is what we call live, actively looking for information.  They are basically sitting in front of a browser looking for information or for a product. This is a prime opportunity to make a rapid sale.

 

Common made mistakes:

It is extremely important that the back end process of conducting a PPC campaign needs to be focused and tightly managed.  In reality most companies put lots of effort into ensuring that the bids are managed properly, campaigns appear, and that  ad text is correct, this is an essential part of the process.  However its only 50% of the story!  You cannot simply expect an ad to deliver sales just by being there and displaying high on the 1st page of Google. Organisations need to look at the beginning to end journey of PPC.  The other 50% is what you do with the customer or potential customer once the ad is being clicked.

Perhaps the most common mistake is to take visitors to your company homepage that contains no relevancy to the searchers request.  When people are looking via a search engine they are looking for a reason, they usually have a live requirement. What they don’t want to do once they have clicked is to conduct further searches on a home page.  They will usually click away or press the back button on the browser at this point.  This is a dead end, you have lost them! So the advice here is unless your home page is spot on relevant to the campaign DON’T do this!

So what should you do to avoid this mistake, here is what we recommend:

  • Dedicated relevant dynamically generated landing pages with large call to actions
  • The relevant page within your e commerce site
  • If it has to be the company site make it a relevant area