Knowledge is the Foundation To Success  

So you just have to ask your customers one question, “Do you feel like buying from me/hiring me/contacting me/partnering with me/using my services?” Of course, you really should follow that question up with a pleasant “Well, do ya?” I’m amazed at how many websites don’t focus on that core question, especially those using pay per click (PPC) advertising to drive traffic to their sites.

If your goal is for a potential customer to call you, then why don’t you have your phone number on every page, asking the customer to call you? If your goal is for a potential customer to purchase something, why don’t you have an Add to Cart button immediately visible on the page right next to the product? If your goal is to get a potential client to send you their contact information, then why don’t you have a simple form available for them to fill out with a nice big Submit button right beneath it?

What action do you hope to entice a new customer into performing? You must ask yourself that question because you need to have an answer for it. If you just send potential customers to a page that doesn’t entice them to perform the action you want them to perform, the odds are greatly in favor of them not doing what you want them to do. Is that what you want to accomplish, especially after you’ve paid for that click with your hard-earned money? I sure hope not.

So go ahead and ask yourself that question, too.

If you need assistance with custom landing page optimization or website development, you may want to check out Webivore. They have done impressive work for JumpFly clients.

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Are you testing new ad copy on Google? Are you trying to see if a new ppc advertising ad will outperform an old ad? One thing you should be aware of is that by default Google will optimize the serving of ads, meaning that over time it will show the best performing ads more often (based on click-thru rate). A vast majority of the time this is a good thing. You want the best performing ads to show more often because this will help keep your click-thru rate up, help keep your quality score strong, etc.

However, sometimes a newer ad never really gets a true chance to prove itself because a strong older ad quickly overtakes it. This leads the new ad to languish and die a quick death because the percentage of time this new ad is shown quickly plummets if it doesn’t immediately outperform the older ad. Of course, sometimes that is okay if the new ad really is that much worse than the older ad.

But what if you really want to test an older ad with a newer ad on a level playing field? Then what do you do? Google does offer the opportunity to rotate ads on a more even basis. If you navigate to the Edit Campaign Settings screen in your Google AdWords account, you will see a Scheduling and Serving category where you can choose to either Optimize the ad serving (the default setting) or you can choose to Rotate and show ads on a more even percentage basis. By choosing to rotate ads more evenly you will allow a newer ad to run 50/50 with an older ad. After a set period of times has elapsed, you can then compare the click-thru/conversion rate of the ads and see how well they have performed against one another. This isn’t necessarily something you want to do all the time, but it is certainly worth taking a closer look at once in awhile if you really want to test ad copy in a true head-to-head battle.

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Looking for positive ROI from your PPC campaigns? Then it’s time to start thinking negative! Are you using negative keywords in your accounts? If you are not, you should be, especially if your pay per click advertising accounts are heavily populated with broad match keywords. You can use negative keywords to filter out searches for products you don’t stock, for brands you don’t carry, or for customers you don’t want, just to name a few things you can exclude.

Let’s say you sell golf shoes. There are quite a few branded producers of golf shoes. You’ve got Nike, Adidas, FootJoy, Callaway, Ecco to name a few. So let’s say you are bidding on golf shoes in a broad or even phrase match variation. Your ads will be showing up for all those brands if people search for “adidas golf shoes” or “ecco golf shoes”, etc. But what if you don’t sell the Adidas brand? You are going to be paying to bring in a lot of annoyed searchers to your website expecting to find Adidas golf shoes because your ad is showing up under that search term. However, if you add “adidas” as a negative keyword, then your ad won’t even show up on Google for those searches. You can often filter out the searchers that are not a good fit for your business or service with a few simple negative keyword additions.

So where do you find these negative keywords? You can use the Google Keyword Tool to research potential negative keywords and quickly add them straight into your account. You can also run the Search Query Performance Report in your Google account and take a look at the results. You will see many of the keywords you already have in your account, but you will also see other keywords that are triggering your ads to show on Google. More often than not, you will see keywords that are not related to your product or service, or keywords that contain a brand you do not stock at all. You can then take these keywords that are not a good for your business and add them as negative keywords into your Ad Groups or at the Campaign level.

Sometimes you need to think negative to increase the positive.

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