Managing Your Pay per Click Advertising Campaigns

To follow on from our overview of pay per click advertising and getting started with pay per click advertising in May & June's edition of Marketing Karma, this month we're looking at some of the more advanced options and managing the success of your search advertising campaigns.

1. Return on Investment (ROI)
Measuring the return on your search advertising campaigns is by far one of the most important activities of your campaign. Without measuring its success, how will you ever know if the campaign is money well spent? The advertising platforms know this and provide advertisers with tools to help measure ROI, and not just for e-commerce websites. The tools include code that you need to insert into your web pages to track that the visitor came from the paid search campaign.
However, it’s impossible to catch all sales or enquiries that come to you through your pay per click campaign, as no doubt some people may find your website from your pay per click ad, but won’t necessarily buy straight away. They might visit a few times before deciding to purchase and if they come to your website directly afterwards rather than through your paid ad, you won’t be able to track the enquiry or sale with the tool provided. However, if you use good log file tracking software or Google analytics you should be also be able to track sales and enquiries from your campaign. In your Google Adwords account, the conversion counter tool can be found by clicking the ‘Conversion tracking’ option in the ‘campaign management’ section.
If you’re a service based business, you can track visitors from the search engines on a contact form, or by asking people when they ring up to enquire.

2. Encouraging Conversions
Once someone has clicked on your ad in the search engines, the next step is to encourage that visitor to buy from you. Your website therefore needs to work hard to convert those visitors into paying customers. Again it’s Google Adwords who leads in this field and they’ve recently introduced a tool called ‘Website Optimiser’ which allows you to test different landing pages for your ads and work out which one provides you with the better conversion rate.
If you don’t have the time or resource to test different landing pages, then take a look around some well known e-commerce sites, such as Amazon and see how they lay out their web pages. The important thing is to make it easy for people to buy and provide them with the information they’re looking for. Make your pages easy to read, with bullet points and clear calls to action, don’t bury information away! This works not only for e-commerce sites, but for service based businesses as well.

3. Managing campaigns
Once your campaigns are set up, make sure you take the time to check how they’re performing on a regular basis. Check your keywords and make sure they’re not generating high impressions with low click throughs or aren’t so competitive your ads are showing way down the list. The advertising providers all give you options to make sure you get the best out of your keywords, but check the free keyword tools provided regularly to add new ones that might give you a better click through rate.

4. Search vs content networks
When you set up a Google Adwords campaign it will default to show your ads on the content network. This means that as well as your ads showing on Google’s search network, including Google search, Ask Search, your ads will appear on publishers websites who have opted to display Google ads on their website via Google Adsense. These websites earn a commission for every click through from the ads displayed.
You don’t have to have your ads running on their content network, and you can opt out of this in the campaign settings. Whether or not you choose to display ads on the content network really depends on how wide a reach you want, what you’re selling and how much you want to spend on clicks. If you’re running small campaigns and targeting other businesses, then it may not be worth showing your ads on the content network. However, for larger budgets and consumer products it may well be worthwhile using this option. You don’t just have to have text ads either. Google allows you to have image & video ads, so you can trial these too and see what kind of response you get.
Yahoo! also gives you the option to show your ads on their content network. Up to now the ads have only been text ads, but with their new ‘Panama’ platform being launched, they may allow you to show image ads too.

5. Targeting other countries
When you set up a new search advertising campaign, both Google Adwords and Microsoft AdCenter give you the option of targeting as many countries as you want. This is done by IP address, so the ads are served to people from the IP address of the countries you’re targeting. This gives your ads a very wide reach, particularly if your products and services are sold abroad. If you have foreign language pages on your website, make sure your ads are in the language of those pages and that they click directly through to those pages on your website. It isn’t a good idea to write ads in foreign languages if the ads land on English language pages – in these cases it’s best to keep the ads in English, even if your ads are appearing in foreign language speaking countries as you’ll target people searching in English. Yahoo! Search Marketing do international targeting in the same way as Google Adwords or Microsoft AdCenter – you need to set up separate accounts for the countries you want to target and at the moment they only offer a limited number of countries to target.

The pay per click providers are continually enhancing their systems to provide the most useful stats and tools for their advertisers. Google Adwords leads the way and Microsoft AdCenter and Yahoo! Search marketing have all had to create or make significant changes to their search advertising management interfaces not only to rival Google Adwords, but to ensure that their advertisers find it easy to navigate the different systems by making them similar to each other. That way advertisers are more likely to use the wider options available, and not just use Google Adwords.