For some marketers, especially B2B companies, the holidays may be a time of year when things slow down, which can be the perfect opportunity to thoroughly cleanse your PPC account and get it to deliver more bang for your buck. On the heels of my blog post on landing page optimization, here are 10 ways to make your PPC campaign more profitable.

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1. Make changes that matter.


Don’t just look for what is not performing well in your campaign, look for areas that would have a big impact on your ROI if it were working better. See what campaigns and ad groups within each campaign represent the greatest share of your overall paid search budget.

Once you’ve identified the most critical areas of your campaign to optimize, start by taking a look at your Quality Score. Improving it will help you reduce your cost-per-click in relation to the position of your ads. This involves looking at each keyword’s CTR, associated ads and taking some of the following steps:

2. Create better targeted ad groups.


Look through your ad groups to find keywords with low Quality Score or low CTR and see what ads are showing up for them. Consider placing these keywords in another ad group with ads that are more relevant. In the case of broad match keywords, use the “See Search Terms” report to find some common queries you are getting clicks for. If some of the keywords that often get clicks are relevant to you, consider using them as a phrase or exact match in the same or new ad group.

Besides using the “See Search Terms” report to better target relevant keywords, use it also add to list of keywords that you do not want to target.

3. Curate your negative keyword lists.


Add negative keywords to your list so that your ads show for more relevant searches. You can find these in the “See Search Terms” report.

4. Use broad match modifiers.

If you have not done so already, add the new broad match modifier to your ad groups. This type of matching is more flexible than phrase and exact match while doing a better job of targeting than broad match. Bid on this match type higher than you would on broad match, and lower than phrase and exact match.

Your CTR does not only rely on your keywords, so it’s important that your ads get users to click.

5. Test your ads.


Look for ways to make your ads stand-out against your competition and test different ideas. Let ads compete against each other and gather sufficient data before eliminating one or more ads. When you come across a test result in one ad group, consider applying what you learned to other ad groups.

Everything I’ve listed so far is primarily meant to increase your CTR. But what about making sure that each click is the best click you can get?

6. Filter out unwanted clicks.


Provide information in your ad copy that will deter your most common unwanted customers. For example, if your services start at $5,000, consider using that in your ad copy. This may go against our strategy of increasing our CTR, but its benefits may outweigh the loss by increasing the value of each click.

7. Use match types to control bids.

Look at broad match keywords that are consuming a lot of your budget, without delivering the goods in the form of conversions. Consider reducing your bids on some of those broader keywords and increase bids on phrase and exact match keywords that are delivering good results.

8. Show ads at the right time.


After doing some preliminary testing by showing ads throughout the day and days of the week, configure your bidding schedule to get your ads more attention when it counts.

I’ve covered most things leading up to the click. Now let’s look at what to do about what visitors see after they click on your ad.

9. Improve device targeting.

Make sure that if you are targeting mobile devices that you are sending traffic to a mobile-friendly page and that this mobile traffic is in a separate campaign from your desktop computer targeting.

10. Conduct landing page optimization.

Work on continually improving the conversion rate of your landing pages. At the end of the day, no matter how cheaply you can generate traffic to your website by improving Quality Score or how well you can filter out unwanted clicks, if your pages are not focused on turning each visitor into a client, then you will always be spinning your tires in the mud. If you need a few tips to get you started, check out 84 Tips For A Killer Landing Page Design.

Below is a demonstration of the effects of conversion optimization on ROI:

Whether online or offline, small businesses often show little faith in the quality of their service or product. Instead, they tend to focus on the limitations and lower their prices. This natural insecurity can lead to disastrous financial results because lower prices cripple your return on investment.

Rest assured, you will make sales if you research the market, locate a need and provided a quality solution. Do not let insecurity waste the blood, sweat and tears you expended on the business. Instead, you should focus on building your credibility and displaying it on your site.

Consider the following:

• If your product is the greatest thing since sliced bread, why are you selling it for a nominal amount? Sell it at a higher price to build credibility. This increases the perceived value because people associate higher prices with better quality.
• Let’s look at professional services based on an hourly fee. If I write an e-book on Internet marketing for attorneys or accountants, the price I charge is going to be based on the conversion ratio. These professionals are particularly time conscious since they bill by the hour in their own practice. If my book promises to get them 10 clients each month producing $50,000 in revenues, the book is extremely valuable to them. If I charge $19.95, my credibility goes down the tube. Why would someone give away such valuable information for such a cheap price? On the other hand, if I charge $599.99, the price adds to the credibility of my claims.
• Don’t worry about charging too much for your service or product. You can always lower the price to ascertain the best figure for converting clients. It is much more difficult to raise the price for current clients.
• Consider offering a free trial or consultation. This increases the perceived value of the service or product. Prospects will view you as credible because you would not give something away if it didn’t work.
• If you know your stuff, you should be writing and publishing articles on the Internet. Unlike an advertisement, articles build an incredible level of credibility for authors and sites. If sites are willing to publish your articles, you must really know your area of expertise, right? Your prospects will think so. Learn more about our Article Marketing Service.
• Include as many testimonials on your site as possible. The comments of previous purchasers will raise your credibility.
• Give people a strong guarantee. For instance, most profitable e-books sites offer an unconditional 365-day refund policy. Yes, the customer has a full 365 days to ask for a refund. Will some people take advantage of this? Yes, but who cares? An e-book requires little overhead, so the refunds are not adding much cost to your business compared to the increased sales you will get because of the guarantee.

Don’t kill your business by lowering your prices. If you are offering quality, charge accordingly and provide proof of your credibility.

Your site is fast and getting traffic, but conversion rates are disappointing. You may have problems with the tone of your content

Do You Believe?

You must have passion for the product or service you are providing. If you don’t believe in it, why should visitors to your site? A lack of belief will result in weak content and poor conversion rates. If you are selling quality, you are doing the prospect a favor. The tone of your site should reflect this in the content.

To effectively convert prospects, every entry page of your site must tell visitors:

1. What you offer,

2. How they will benefit, and

3. Demand they take action.

Entry Pages

Many sites have conversion problems related to entry pages. Most people automatically envision the home page as the sole entry path to the site. Sweat, blood and tears are spent making the home page just write. Conversely, a fraction of the same effort is applied to internal pages. This is a fundamental mistake.

If server statistics are checked, you may be surprised to find significant amounts of traffic entering your site through internal pages of your site. Yes, a large percentage of visitors are entering the site without seeing the home page. If your “hook” is only on the home page, your conversions will suffer. Make sure you have a concise summary of your service and the benefits on every entry page to the site and conversions will improve.

What You Offer

Tell visitors exactly what you do with the first sentence. Don’t be subtle. You only have a few seconds to get their attention. Don’t waste it. The opening sentence should read something like, “At XYZ, we offer quality tools at wholesale prices.” Bam! The prospect knows exactly what you are offering and if it fills their need.

Benefits

Tell your prospect how they will benefit from doing business with you. Don’t assume they understand it. Again, be blunt with something like, “You save money when you buy from us because we have a low overhead and free shipping.” Bam! Now the visitor knows you sell tools at a low price. This combination should result in shopping activity if they have any need for the tool products.

Demand Action

What do you want prospects to do when they visit your site? At the end of your content, make sure you tell them. “Click here to order” is a perfectly fine statement, but adding a benefit is optimal. “Click here to order with free shipping” is a superior demand. Regardless, make sure you tell them what to do and make it is easy as possible to take the requested action.

If you are offering quality, you are doing clients a favor. Make sure the tone of your site reflects that fact.

Your site is getting traffic, but conversion rates are horrible. Everything seems to be working, so what’s wrong? Your site may simply be to slow.

Load Times

Give some thought to the sites you have visited of the past few weeks. Were you willing to wait 20 seconds for a site to load or did you hit the back button? Why would visitors to your site behave any differently? They won’t.

Webmasters, designers and site owners universally access the web through high-speed connections. Because of this, it is easy to forget roughly 45% of surfers use dial-up connections. While your site may appear to load quickly on your high-speed connection, have you tried loading it on a 56k connection? The results can be shocking.

Sites that appear to load quickly on a high-speed connection can take forever on 56k. It is not unheard of to find a “fast site” actually takes 30, 50 or 80 seconds to load on a 56k. Sometimes, the load time is so slow the browser will actually “time out” and fail to show anything. If your site has this problem, 45% of the hits are worthless. Worse, those frustrated surfers are unlikely to try to access your site in the future even if you fix the speed problems.

How fast should a page load on a 56k connection? As fast as possible, but no slower then 25 seconds. If you can get 56k load times below 10 seconds, you can turn a negative into a competitive advantage. Surfers come back to fast sites.

Determining Load Times

The best way to determine the load time for your site is to actually use a 56k connection. While this solution isn’t particularly technical, it will let you see exactly what your prospects are seeing when they visit the site. You will be able to see what loads quickly and what appears slowly. This should let you isolate particular elements in need of optimizing.

Server statistics can also provide you with evidence of slow load times. Are users spending a lot of time on entry pages, but not visiting internal pages? Either you have poor content or a loading problem.

Finally, you can also use diagnostic programs to test load times. Typically, the programs will kick out estimated load times for dial-up, DSL and T1 connections. Make sure you test your home page and internal pages. Diagnostic programs are excellent tools, but don’t get lazy. Make sure you physically watch your site load on a dial-up connection. The experience will prove invaluable to improving your site and conversion rates.

Improving Performance

The steps needed to improve the performance of your site often depend on the nature of the site. A database driven site will have different issue than a graphic intense site. There are, however, universal factors that can be checked:

1. Graphics: Typically, browsers have to make a connection for each image on a page. The more you have, the longer the load time. Limiting the number and size of graphics can help.

2. Tables: If you use tables, try to break them up into smaller modules. Large tables can negatively impact load times.

3. Multimedia: If it flashes, explodes, spins or blinks, consider ditching it. Yes, it looks great, but is it worth 45% of your audience?

4. Size: Scrutinize the size of your pages. The bigger the page, the slower the load times. It shouldn’t be a problem if the page is comprised of text, but large pages with lots of code will load slowly.

Cheer up if you have a speed problem! Yes, you’ve lost a lot of business, but now you can fix it. Most of your competitors will never figure it out. That puts you ahead of the game.