Attracting People to Your Ad

Here's an article that can help getting people
to ACTUALLY SEE YOUR AD and RESPOND!!

Now that you've selected your keywords, you need to get those
searching to click on our ad, which in turn will result in
them clicking through to your web site and potentially
purchasing our product.

One of the simplest ways to get peoples attention is to
use their search keywords in the title of your
PPC ad. This has been proven to increase
click-thru rates on ad's by over 50%.

Why? Simple. If the potential customer is searching for "ROI
Tracking" and the title of a PCP ad begins with "ROI
Tracking", then their attention will be grabbed instantly.
He or she doesn't need to know much else, other than that
the PPC ad is catered specifically for him or her.

One thing to keep in mind is that you can sometimes create a
more relevant title by combining your different keywords
into one PPC ad. For example, I could have easily used
something like "ROI Tracking PHP Script" as the title of my
ad, which effectively would have decreased my click-thru
rate, but definitely caters my ad more to a specific
audience. Once again, this comes down to analysis and
adjustment.

Another important technique to attract attention to your ad
is to differentiate yourself from your competitors. In our
particular case, the majority of our competition offer
hosted solutions, whereby they manage the software on their
servers in return for monthly or per traffic fees.

Our product caters to a different audience, those that want
more control over their software, as well as those not
wanting to pay monthly fees. So, in this example, I would
make the title of my ad "Pay no monthly or per traffic
fees".

Next -- and this is where experimentation is extremely
important -- you need to create a description for
your PPC ad that will attract the potential
customer and let them know that your product
is exactly what they are searching for.
To do this, I start my ad's description with "Track PPC,
campaigns & search".

Finally, it's good practice to add a "Call to action" at the
bottom of your ad. If you're not familiar with this term,
its usually an instruction to tell the person to do
something, such as "Click here to view a demo", "Download
Now", etc.

Marketing experts seem to agree that the average human needs
to be prompted to click on an ad or take action, so we'll
add this line to the end of our PPC ad's description:

"Track PPC, campaigns & search. Try demo!"

Reducing Click-Thru's

Sometimes it's important to reduce the number of clicks your
PPC ad is receiving. This could be because you are
attracting people who are only after f-r-e-e products/services,
or even the wrong target market.

The two quickest ways to reduce click-thru's are to
make the description of your ad more targeted
and to add the price of the product to the ad.

Making the description more targeted (as I've discussed
above) can reduce your overall click-thru rate, but
potentially increase the likelihood of a click resulting in
a purchase.

In my earlier example, by adding the words "PHP script" to
the description, we are effectively filtering out those
looking for a hosted solution, downloadable software or even
those with a server that isn't capable of running PHP
scripts.

We also increase the targeting of our ad because we now know
that the majority of those clicking on the ad are looking
for a PHP script, which is exactly what our product is.

Secondly, by adding the price of the product you are selling
to the end of the ad, you instantly eliminate those looking
for f-r-e-e products, and target those willing to purchase your
product or service.

Tracking Your Clicks and Conversions

The fundamental core of a successful advertising campaign --
whether it be a PPC ad, banner ad or even newspaper ad -- is
knowing whether or not your ad's are actually converting
into sales or not.

If your ads aren't making you m-o-n-e-y then you're more than
likely better off saving your advertising dollars and
adjusting your ad's or using your marketing budget elsewhere
in your company.

Both Google and Overture have built in tracking and
conversion tools that you can use to get a holistic view of
your current PPC ad campaigns. You can even use external
tools which let you add conversion code to your website to
tell you exactly which of your ad's are converting into
sales and which aren't. This is often referred to as knowing
your ROI or Return on Investment.

We need to know exactly how much m-o-n-e-y we are making per
dollar spent on every PPC ad. If the ROI is positive and we
are making more m-o-n-e-y than we are spending, then the ad is
working and we can use this knowledge to further improve our
other ad's or increase ad spending for that particular
ad/set of keywords.

If, however, our ad's are costing us more than they are
returning, then we can reduce our spend, change our
approach, or remove these ad's altogether. It's a rather
simple formula, but frustratingly ignored by many
advertisers.

You must track your ads if you want to succeed with any form
of Internet advertising. You should also constantly monitor
and adjust your ads according to how they are performing,
your return on investment, etc.

Conclusion

Hopefully I've provided you with a clear insight into PPC
advertising and techniques that you can use to improve your
advertising campaigns. It pays -- pun intended -- to do your
research and understand your target market, because the
rewards can sometimes be much more than you expected.

Copyright © 2005, Interspire, Eddie Machaalani

About the Author:

Eddie Machaalani is the Interspire marketing and project
manager. He's most recently been kept busy helping out with
the interface design for Interspire's ROI and Conversion
Tracking Application, TrackPoint. To see how TrackPoint can
help boost your revenue, go here:
http://www.interspire.com/trackpoint