PPC Advertising - If you can Make it Work, the Best Way to Start and Keep Driving Traffic to Your Site
Driving traffic is the subject of so much marketing chatter and promotional materials and services on the web that it is easy to get confused - and taken.
I'm going to try to make it as simple as I can for you - for a beginning web business it is all about Pay Per Click advertising. All the rest, if they work, is gravy. But the basic profitability of your business will initially depend on your driving traffic to your website through PPC advertising - and by this I mean AdWords and Bing Ads.
I know that this may not be a popular point of view -- some of you may be worried about the expense of PPC, and so are looking to somehow get "free" traffic.
And while I like organic traffic as much as anyone, you can't build a business on this sort of free traffic. One change to Google's algorithm, and your business can be gone. I know -- I've seen it happen to competitors, and I've seen my organic traffic vary dramatically over the years (as I write this, it about 1/3 of what it was just 2 years ago)
So ... if you want to have a sustainable business, one that you can continue to drive new traffic to and, hopefully, new sales, you have to be prepared to spend on marketing. If you aren't, then you aren't really a real business.
And online, the most effective marketing I've used by far is PPC. I'd love to get general display advertising to work for my sites. But despite a lot of time and effort, I just can't get this type of advertising to work. PPC, on the other had, while something that takes a lot of time and effort to learn to do well, really has paid off for us year after year.
Again, just to make sure you understand what I'm saying, PPC in reality really means Google Adwords. While Bing Ads is also worth doing, it offers a fraction of the traffic that Adwords can bring. So learning how to use Adwords, and use it well, is really worth the effort and can make or break your ability to compete on the web.
Perhaps before turning to PPC advertising in detail, I should first address other ways to drive traffic and let you know why I don't like to initially place a lot of reliance on them:
Search Engine Optimization Believe me , I love getting free traffic from search engines. And many of my sites do get a great deal of free traffic by coming up highly on search engine results. But I see all this as gravy - and not something that you can count on. November of 2003 brought this point home. In one day Google changed its way of ranking web pages and I had a number of clients drop from #1 to off the results for their important keywords. Fortunately within a few months they all came back to good placements, but this could happen again at any time. And now with Yahoo and MSN with their own search engine (Bing), a particular page may do well on one of the major search engines and do badly on the others for no particular reason at all. Trying to reverse engineer these search engines, especially when they all constantly change their basic algorithms, is just a losing game.
So I do the basics for search engine optimization on my site and then forget it. I try to concentrate my site on providing really good content, and hope that whatever the algorithm a search engine uses that it will, in the end, reward good content. And for the most part this has paid off over the years.
The basics I always try to do are: have the important keyword for that page in the pages title, keep the title fairly short and descriptive, put the keyword in the meta tag (although I am not sure these help anymore, but you never know), use the keyword in the title of the page (and this title needs to have a H1 tag), and have the keyword appear early and often in the first few paragraphs. Most of these things occur naturally in a well written page whose content is about this keyword. The only other thing I do is put in a meta tag description as well, since sometimes search engines will use this when they display your page's results.
With the Panda update I've recently spent a great deal of time making sure my site's code doesn't have errors, that I have all the basic pages Google looks for in an ecommerce site (contact page, about us, privacy, security, shipping, etc. And that the address and phone number display as well as email). In addition I've worked aggressively to lower the bounce rate of my site and also get more people to stay over 10 seconds. I've done this by having shorter landing pages with the content spread out over associated pages.
One other aspect I should mention is the importance of linking. Getting links to your site is vital in a number of respects - if for no other reason, so that the search engines will find your site by coming across it as a link from another web page.
But in addition, Google, and the other major search engines as well, use the amount and quality of links coming into your site as one important factor in determining their search results. The general idea is that links to your sites are votes for your site (other sites saying your site's content is worth looking at), and the more votes for your site (and the more votes coming from sites that the search engines think are important (that is, sites that have lots of links coming into them)) the more value your site will be assigned by the search engines.
The way that search engines use links to put a value on your site is a deep and complex issue - and the theories on this change all the time. While in the past any sort of link to your site might have been accorded value by the search engines, these days the thought is that links coming in from sites that are in your "theme" (sites that concentrate on content areas similar to yours) may count more and unrelated links (links coming from sites that are totally unrelated in their theme) may have be given less or no value.
I only mention this to let you know that how search engines value links is evolving over time (in large part to make sure that webmasters aren't able to manipulate the search engine results by just creating links). So when you think about linking think about it from a long term perspective - links from site's that relate to your businesses theme and are good, quality sites should work well for you now and in the future for search engine purposes, and also may give you some good traffic as well.
Google has made "bad" linking a focus lately through its Penguin updates. The idea behind Penguin is to penalize sites that have links coming in from sketchy places (link farms, paid placement links, links from a page whose content has no relationship to the keywords in the link, etc.). You want to avoid getting hit by Penguin -- so it is important than ever to have good, relevant links coming in to your site.
In conclusion, this basic search engine optimization strategy I outlined above, along with good, common sense linking has, for the most part, worked well for my sites over the years and weathered well all the sea of changes in the way of search engine determine their results. But it takes awhile for the search engine organic search to start to show a new site. I suggest giving it 3 - 9 months to see if your pages start coming up well for your important keywords.
Directory Listing Inclusion There are a lot of directories on the web (think online yellow pages), and some offer free listings while other offer a listing for a price (Yahoo is one of the main ones of these, and last I heard it cost $299 a year). DMOZ is another big one, and free -- but it can be very difficult to get into since they use volunteers to edit it, and they can be very backed up.
Getting a link in a directory can be nice, especially for a local business in a relevant local directory. But when starting out my advice - go for those that are highly rated that offer a free listing at first. And then later, if you want, you can spend a bit to be in some of the better rated directories.
For local businesses, you might want to consider services that will submit you to a bunch for fairly inexpensive price. I avoid these for a national website since I would rather spend my money in a few directories that have more authority. But for a local business, this may make sense in that Google looks at local directories when deciding on the credibility of a business (and, so, whether it should show in the local part of the search results). I did this for a local restaurant, and I think it helped and his Google + Local listing is #1 for his keyword despite the fact that his competition has been around for many more years.
Shopping Search Engines The best known of these is Shopping.com (which is in the process of changing over to Ebay Commerce, and Google has its own as well Google Shopping. A couple of other portals are Bizrate and PriceGrabber.
I've enrolled in both Shopping.com and the previous version of Google Products for myself and clients, and so far I'm just not seeing much traffic. But as more users learn about these shopping search engines they may hold more promise in terms of traffic.
But one major benefit of enrolling in Shopping.com is that as part of it you end up with an Epinions listing for your business as well. The following section describes more about this -- as Shopping.com changes over to Ebay Commerce the process of how they do their reviews may change as well. But I'm guessing they will continue to use Epinions to power the reviews showing up on Ebay Commerce.
Shopping.com owns Epinions, and uses Epinions as the place for its users to review stores listing on Shopping.com. I love the idea of Epinions - it is an independent site which allows users to put up their reviews of websites they use. And a fair amount of people do use Epinions as a place to research products and stores. The Epinions reviews provide a feedback mechanism like that found on Ebay, and users really do find this kind of feedback useful when picking an online merchant.
My own experience is that these type of third party reviews are very important to customers, and really add credibility to your site. I have over 800 reviews posted about my site over the years on Shopping.com, and I really believe that this helps people feel comfortable buying from my site vs a competitor.
I believe so strongly in the benefit Epinions reviews that signing up for Shopping.com is one of the first things I do when starting a new business. It usually takes a couple of weeks till the Epinions part of this is live. At this point I send an email to previous customers asking for the feedback on my business and giving them the link to the Epinions review site. I've also started to add a checkout survey at the end of the shopping cart process that gives my customers the chance to give their feedback after buying.
This is a two part process - the first survey is right after purchase and asks questions about the buying process and the website, the second part is emailed to people a few weeks later and covers the shipping and delivery process, product questions, and overall impression of the website. I've been using this survey for the My Favorite Baby Carrier site for a year now, and we've had 62 customers fill out the survey form - a lot more than I expected.
And from the data I've seen on this, these kind of good independent reviews can increase sales 30 - 40%. In our experience, we have heard from customers that the Epinions/Shopping.com reviews do carry weight a lot of weight - and getting trusted store status has been an additional boost as well. It is important to remember that you have no control over these reviews, so I only suggest doing Epinions/Shopping.com if you are truly committed to giving a great customer experience, both on your website and in customer service.
Once I have a number of positive reviews, I place the Shopping.com ratings prominently on the website. As and example, you will find the Shopping.com logo (with its overall review of Healthy Foundations) at the top of the pages for this site.
So while I don't really think that the shopping services provide a great deal of traffic at the moment, I do believe that the Epinions portion of Shopping.com does offer a unique opportunity to differentiate your business from that of your competitors. And also, while the traffic may not be large, it is very targeted and we've found that it has a very high conversion rate - so it is has been definitely worth it from a ROI perspective as well.
Search Engine Optimization Services These are companies that you can pay to optimize your pages for your specific keywords. They offer all sorts of amazing results - and guarantee top placements or you get your money back.
I really don't believe these people have any sort of insider knowledge - and even if they did, it all can change in one day as noted before. So I don't believe they offer any particular advantage over doing the basic optimization you can do for your own pages. And they are pretty costly - usually a thousand dollars and up. Also, I don't believe in their guarantees. My guess is that they guarantee a certain amount of keywords will be in the top 30 results, or that your business name will come up in the top 10 when you search for it (which it should anyway), or that they will get some very specific keyword phrase in the top 10.
And while this sounds impressive, in reality it is pretty easy to get high placement in search engine results if you use a long enough, very specific keyword phrase. So while it is difficult to be in the top 10 results for the keyword "mattress", it is pretty easy to be in the top 10 for the phrase "self inflating air bed mattress". Hey, if they will guarantee you top 10 placement, or your money back, for those keywords that will drive 90% of your traffic and sales, then I say maybe it makes sense. But I'm pretty sure this isn't the deal - they may guarantee that 90% of the keywords they work on will be in the top 10 positions, but your important keywords will probably be in the other 10% not covered by their guarantee.
Linking Strategies I know I should be concerned about getting links for my sites since Google, Yahoo and MSN use incoming links as a factor in determining the importance of my site and its pages (and for even finding your pages to index in the first place). But I just can't get myself all geared up for this, and I'll tell you why.
First, a good number of my pages and my client's come up well in search engines with minimal links. And I think this is because of my second point - it is tough to get good links for a business site. Your competition doesn't want to link to you, and there just aren't many other sites which deal in your subject matter on the web that might have an interest in linking to you. And those that might be interested, who are in a related type of business, will mostly not have a links page since they are in the business of selling their product - not in getting people to visit other sites.
Those few who do have links pages often bury them inside the site so that they may not even be counted by the search engines (who often won't go down more then 2 or 3 levels into a site). And even if you do find a site that jumps over all these hurdles, you then have to both convince them to link with you and use the linking language you would need. I've found that every time I get the energy to try to find sites which might meet all these criteria for linking, I just run out of steam in an hour or so and decide it just isn't going to happen. But that isn't to say that developing links isn't a good idea - just that it is hard work to find good links from site's in your theme areas.
I do link to those sites I am associated with - the other sites I've designed and my client's sites. All these are quality sites and I would want to link to them in any event. These sites are a hodgepodge of different interest areas, so they aren't supposedly the most effective sites I could link to. According to Google's information, a site link counts more if it comes from a site in the same sort of interest area. But I've already mentioned the difficulty getting these kind of links from your competitors or related businesses, so I go with what I know. I have probably a dozen or so sites linked in this way now, and I would suggest trying to get this sort of linking connection going with other businesses you may personally know as well. But you should feel good about the sites you are linking to. Don't link just to link, make sure that the sites are ones you really would refer your family or friends.
Lately, there has been a lot of new ways to get links showing up in the marketplace. From elaborate link trading programs to marketplaces where you can buy links (the higher a page's page rank, the more expensive the link from that page is on the open market). Given the Penguin update, avoid these types of paid linking arrangements.
As I reread what I wrote on linking, I noticed that I left off what may be the most important "old school" aspect of linking - getting actual traffic from your site from links on other people pages or from links in important directories.
So putting aside any consideration of how links may help or hurt your search engine positioning, links that actually bring traffic to your site from other sites or directories are certainly wonderful. But how do you get these kind of links? Its tough to get these kind of links that actually generate traffic - getting a link on a page with a list of links isn't likely to get you any actual traffic.
These days, few people, if any, actually look at these links pages on a website - people don't care about a website's page of links, they care about the website's content, the information they came to that website for in the first place. If you can get a link on an actual content page rather than just a links page you may end up getting some traffic from that link - but these are hard links to get (not many sites want to include your link so that their visitors will leave their content page and head to your site). So it is a bit if a chicken and egg issue - links on link pages aren't very useful (except for their possible help with search engine positioning), but they are often the only kind of link you can get.
One option that has been talked about is that instead of trying to get links or trading links, you can trade articles with like minded websites. That is, they will put an article or review on their site of your products and you will do the same. And these articles will contain links back to your respective sites. This article or review exchange is an interesting option, but it does take a lot more work to get accomplished (getting another website to write an article or review can be a tough task), and it will only help get you traffic if the other website's users can find the article on their webpage and have an interest in its content.
Getting links that generate actual traffic is pretty tough - and you may need to get hundreds of links to generate any real traffic. But that doesn't mean you should give up on linking. Just know that it is tough and look to make links with sites that you think may serve a similar customer base and will want to actually put your link on a content page. And know that in return you will probably need to give them a similar link in exchange.
Other Assorted Web Marketing "Opportunities" I must get a email or phone call from one client a month approached about a different kind of web marketing "opportunity". These range from various pop-over or pop-under advertising schemes to search engine optimization takeoffs.
So far I haven't come across one that I feel comfortable with. The pop-over and pop-under advertising schemes, for instance, usually are using special programs that a user unknowingly put on their computer when loading in a "free" program. Similarly, opt-in email programs are never really opt-in, and even if they were would still be involved in sending out huge amounts of unsolicited email - and I just don't want to be a spammer.
So my advice to you is to ask a lot of questions about these "opportunities" and really understand the way in which they will drive traffic to your site. Most of the salespeople I talk with give a very quick, almost unintelligible version of how their program works. Ask for details and don't go with any program unless you really understand how it works and feel comfortable with how it will be trying to drive traffic.
Local Businesses -- Getting Your Site To Show At The Top of The Google Local Listings For Your Important Search Terms
Getting seen online is a bit different for a local business. And by local business, I mean a bricks and mortar local business selling products or services to a local market
I worked with a friend recently that was opening a new Indian restaurant in Boulder, CO. And he really didn't have money, at first, for marketing
So I offered to help him, because I thought it would be fun and since it was very different from what I do usually (which is sell things nationally, not locally)
Out of interest I had taken courses on local business internet marketing. Because I know that most of these small business really don't have any sense of how to use the internet to get business, and I thought it would be fun to help them.
If you are one of these local businesses, I want to warn you -- beware folks peddling internet marketing for local businesses. They are focused on getting you to pay monthly fees for things that you really don't need -- like SEO.
Here's what I did for my friend, and the total cost (other than my time) was under $1,000 total, including not only the money we put out for copies, creating a menu, and for basic Adwords advertising.
After confirming his ownership of this business, I went into the administrative areas and put in all the information including pics and videos. It is important to fill out this information completely in order to have the best possible quality score for these listings.
Then I did a very small website. With just a basic links to the menu, etc. Here's the basic starter design I did for Curry n Kebob (this will open in a new tab). I had them register the domain and then point it to a this page I hosted on my site (with a setting so it masked the page name and just showed the domain). Then I updated the business listings to show the web address.
I also set up a new Yelp account for the business in a similar manner. Yelp has a way to put in a listing for a new business, and then you claim it and amend the information. But be warned, once you have a new Yelp listing the business owner will get hit repeatedly by Yelp for advertising. I finally had to call and talk to a supervisor to ask them to leave the owner alone. And only then did the calls from Yelp stop.
Now I did go ahead and spend a couple hundred bucks having the business put into a lot of local directories. You can find a lot of options for these sort of services -- the one I used was Universal Business Listings and I just did the lowest priced package.
But what I also did was searched for Indian Restaurant on Google after setting my location as Boulder (you can set the location by clicking on the Search Tools tab and putting in the zip code for your local business), and I then submitted by hand to all the directories that came up in the first 100 listing.
When you do these directory listings, make sure you use the same information every time -- same name, address, phone, description, URL, etc.
Now while I think all these are important basics, I can't say just doing these will get you listed highly in the search results. What I did next is the special sauce -- I had the owner put cards on every table that asked people for their reviews.
I bought a bunch of brochure holders, and made up a card template to fit into the holder (so about 3 3/4" wide by 11" long). On the card, I wrote that we'd love to get your review, and then gave them links to the Google review page for the restaurant. Later, I switched out this card with one asking for Yelp reviews along with an easy link. And I did a QR code for each as well so people could scan these with their phone and easily get to the review page
The result? Within a few months the restaurant had more Google reviews than any other Indian restaurant in Boulder, and after a year they also have the most in Yelp.
If you are going to do this, you absolutely need to make sure your service or product is top notch. Getting bad reviews just will kill your chances of getting a good listing and your business as well. So you need to believe that you really are doing something very well and have confidence that customers think so as well.
In our case, people love this restaurant. He has not only the most reviews in Google and Yelp, but the highest ratings as well.
So if you do a search for Indian Restaurant in Boulder, Curry n Kebob is the first listing that appears on the local search results.
It is a bit harder to do this now since Google changed the way it does local reviews. It used to be that all you had to do was to have a Google account to do a review. Now you have to be part of Google +, and this is a much smaller group of folks. So if I were going to do this today, I would concentrate on asking for Yelp reviews first. And then after we had a bunch of these, try for Google +. But I do think that getting Google reviews is still very important in order to get the high listings in their local search results.
One last thing I did was to do very simple Adwords advertising for the restaurant. I did two campaigns -- one that I set to only advertise within a 5 mile radius of the restaurant for important keywords like "indian food", etc., and one that didn't have a geographical limit but used keywords with geographical terms like "indian food boulder", etc. (this catches folks who are researching Indian Food in Boulder from wherever they may live outside Boulder). This was very inexpensive, and these ads did show up for every search of these very targeted terms. I think it ran about $25 a month, and Adwords had sent him a card that gave him the first $100 for free.
So what was the results of all this? It took about 6 - 9 months to really take hold, but at about this point lines were forming outside the restaurant during busy time -- and I found I couldn't come in with my family anymore because they were too busy. (I didn't charge him for my time, but just got free food -- which was great until it became so busy)
The site itself doesn't come up high on a search, but the restaurants listing in the local results on the search page is #1. And that is why I say to forgo these expensive monthly SEO packages. Getting high in Google's local results is a great way to go and something you can shoot for yourself if you just follow the system I used. You may need to pay someone to do some of these things for you (design a small site, grab your Google + and Yahoo business listings and put yourself in our directories), but the cost of doing this is a drop in the bucket in comparison to the price of the local internet marketing packages I've seen.
The key to my strategy, again, is getting your customers' reviews on Google + and Yelp. Putting out the cards worked great for us, or you could also give them this sort of card asking for reviews with their bill (in a restaurant), or in the bag with their merchandise or their take out order. All we had to do was ask and give them simple directions on finding the Google + or Yelp page for our business to post their review. And people were very nice -- really, their response was more than I could have expected, and their reviews really made all my work worthwhile since I saw how much they enjoyed the food and loved the restaurant.
Pay Per Click Advertising - The Place to Start
So, we are back to PPC advertising (read Adwords). This is where I spend most of my time and money, and is probably the place to start when you decide to spend money on marketing on the web.
And while PPC is very easy to start with, it is something that is hard to do well. But doing it well really can give you an edge over your competition. So I really urge you to study Adwords in particular. A good place to start, and one of the ones I started with, is Perry Marshall's Definitive Guide To Adwords. This will give you a good introduction to adwords, but it is deep waters and if you end up spending a fair amount you may want to take more in-depth courses (I've spent a lot of money with Perry, and done the Bobsled run as well as his Adwords seminars, and I can tell you doing these expensive programs makes sense if you are spending a few thousand a month or more on adwords. But to begin with, the Definitive Guide is more than sufficient to start with)
There simply is no more cost effective way to generate sales than Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC). In real-time you can not only test your advertising keywords and sales copy but by using the ROI trackers you can see which keywords and advertising are working and are most cost effective (and once you know this, you can use this knowledge to focus on these important keywords on your page for search engine optimization purposes as well.) In my view, PPC advertising is the basic building block on which you can build your web business. It is repeatable and allows you some control over getting your business out on the web. The trick is to make it cost effective, and this can take a bit of work.
The two basic PPC advertisers you will need to use are AdWords, Google's advertising program, and Bing Ads - which provides ads for Yahoo, MSN, and other search partners.
I usually just concentrate on AdWords at first since it is much larger and gives access to a lot more traffic. Then, if I get a campaign working on Adwords, I will transfer it over to Bing Ads (you can export it from Adwords and then import it into Bing)
I don't intend to go into AdWords too deeply in this section - it is just such a dense area and it is much too deep a subject. Again, I really urge you to get a good basic reference on Adwords to start with like Perry's Definitive Guide to Adwords. It is amazing how many folks don't do just the basics right (like having the ad use as the landing page the actual product page your ad refers to rather than just the home page or a general category page), so if you just learn the information in this guide you will be way ahead of the game (and just so you know, these are just links -- I don't get anything from Perry if you buy it).
But here are a few basic points I've picked up that might help you get your AdWords campaign off the ground:
Start Simply I would recommend starting with a short list of your most apparent keywords. In my experience, I usually get almost all my traffic from these basic keywords. I've read a lot about finding the cheap, forgotten keywords, but I can't say I've had any luck in finding the $.05 keyword that drives a lot of traffic.
And even if your most obvious keywords are more expensive, often these convert at a much higher rate so end up being more cost effective in the long run. So go with what you feel are the keywords most likely to generate targeted traffic (you should have found these with Adwords Keyword tool, etc.), and then concentrate on making these keywords work for you. You may want to break these into a few campaigns if they are about a few different themes.
Write Specific Ads You will get better click through rates for ads that incorporate your keywords into the ads title or sales copy. That is one reason to break the keywords into separate campaigns - this allows you to write different ads to that will incorporate those specific keywords. And matching your ad copy to your keywords (and the copy of your landing page) will help you get a higher quality score for the keyword -- which means you will buy the keyword at a discount.
Test Multiple Ads AdWords allows you to run more than one ad at a time per campaign. Always test a couple to begin with, and over time eliminate the worst performer and try a different variation of the more successful ad. AdWords has a built in option for running only the best performing ad, so in order to do a good test of your two or more ads you will need to un check this campaign option.
Track Your ROI It is essential that you track your ROI. AdWords has a free ROI tool, and if you don't use this you will be flying blind. It will let you know which keywords and ads convert and how well. You may be surprised by the results, as well as seeing that you can get good click through and conversion from the #3 or #4 slot (so you don't have to be the highest bidder)
Bid High In Beginning I think it makes sense to bid pretty aggressively at the beginning. This not only hopefully will get you near the top of the ad listings, but higher ads also get a better click through rate. Once you have a good click through rate you can then lower your bid and hopefully you still remain in the top 3 or 4 results. So you will need to watch this at first, but I keep the bid fairly high for the first 100 or so clicks. You can get a feel for the amount of the bid in the Adwords keyword tool -- although the amounts it suggests can be way off, so start with half of this and see if you can then decrease again by half after you get some clicks.
Set a High Daily Limit AdWords ask you to set a daily limit. But the way AdWords works, it may well stop serving your ads even if you aren't in danger of surpassing this limit. So I set my limits very high to make sure my ad will show every time it can. Of course my keywords traffic are such that I know I will only be exposing myself to a certain level of cost. If you are bidding on a keyword that has huge traffic, though, you may want to limit your cost exposure by setting the limit lower.
Don't Worry About Making a Profit at First At first I don't even worry about making a profit. I am basically shooting to break even. Over time, hopefully, as I get more traffic I will be able to hone both my AdWords campaign and my site's conversion so I do end up making a profit. But this will take some time - usually it takes a couple of months of working on the site and AdWords till I get a good feel for if the site will be profitable by using PPC.
So don't stress if things aren't working great at first. This is the number one problem I've encountered with clients. They get too worked up about whether the site is profiting at first, and most have been tempted to pull the plug after a few weeks when they weren't getting the kinds of sales they were looking for. Luckily I convinced them to be patient, and after a month or two things have come around. So stick with it and keep tweaking the ads and your site for at least a couple of months before making any decisions on whether the PPC campaigns are working.
Use a Targeted Landing Page There is nothing worse than clicking on a PPC ad about a specific product or subject and ending up on a general home page where you have to again search for your specific product or interest area. Don't make this same mistake - make sure you send your PPC users to a page that is targeted for the keyword that they were searching on. Not only will your visitors find this more usable, but you should get a better sales conversion for these users as well. As an example, when I started sending the My Favorite Baby Carrier PPC visitors directly to the ERGO product page, rather than the more general home page. And while it has only been a short while since I made this change, I saw about a 50% increase in my sales conversions.
Lastly, one thing you should consider is advertising to a buyers' guide landing page rather than a sell page. I've found this approach can really bring down your price per click since it has a much higher click through rate (people click on information rather than just another ad selling something). You need to put together a great landing page that delivers on this promise -- so a buying guide offering great tips and other insider type of information on your product that no one else sharing on the web.
Then you either append your sales copy to the end of this, or link to the sales page. So once you've taught them what to look for when buying your product, get them over to your product and show how it delivers the quality and features that you said they needed to consider when buying the product
If you do this sort of campaign, you will need to work on these different copy aspects to get it to deliver positive ROI. But if you can, you have a real advantage over your competition since your ad gets such a much higher click through. This will make your quality score go through the roof, and so you may end up effectively paying a fraction of your competition per click. Which means your ad will show higher, and you can often show wherever you like in the ad results -- getting into the top three isn't as hard as usual since you have such a high click through rate in comparison to the other ads being shown.
