How to Maximize Your PPC ROI

Whether you are working with a smaller budget or simply looking to cut down costs, spending your PPC budget wisely is more important than ever. Instead of simply pausing your campaign or lowering your daily budget, try thinking smarter and following the tips included below to keep costs down and conversions up!

Improve Targeted PPC Campaigns

1. Experiment with Day Parting: Day Parting allows users to pause their PPC campaigns during parts of the day where their budget may be going to waste, or to simply save their budget for hours where they have experienced high conversion rates in the past. This helps ensure your budget is being used during peak hours for each campaign.
2. Run Campaigns Targeted at Different Geo-locations: Do not simply default to targeting your campaign to the entire United States – think strategically about your top feeder markets and try targeting them through a separate segmented campaign.
3.  Experiment with Mobile PPC: A campaign targeted specifically to mobile users within your local market is a great low cost opportunity to capture some last minute conversion.

Figure 1: The Targeted & Mobile campaigns experienced more clicks, better positioning,
and a higher CTR than the Nationwide campaign.

Develop Effective Landing Pages to Increase Conversion

1. Strong Call to Action: Potential customers must be prompted to act when they land on your website by clicking on a paid advertisement. Make your call to action clear and visible. Some examples of calls to action are click here, call now, book now or contact us.
2. Keep it Simple: Make sure that there is the landing page is not too wordy. Bullet points work well or steps that lead to the call to action are also acceptable. Relevant images are perfect in conveying a compelling message. Also, marketers need  to make sure that their landing pages (for ads as well as site pages in general) are well written and descriptive.
3. Build Trust: A great way to add trust to your landing page is to add reviews to it or link it to an authoritative review site.

Conclusion

Some simple ways to keep a PPC campaign cost effective is to focus on geo targeting and day parting strategies. In addition, paying attention to landing page relevancy will result in higher quality scores, better positioning and higher conversions.

Sources:

• Optimum7, “PPC Landing Pages”, http://www.optimum7.com/internet-marketing/sem/ppc-landing-pages.html
• LinkTrackr, “Improve Landing Page Conversion Rates with A/B Split Testing”, http://www.linktrackr.com/blog/landing-page-conversion-rate/

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Contributed by:
Subina Desai, eStrategist
David Addison, eStrategist