Using PPC to Increase Traffic to Your Website

Pay-per-click (PPC) ads are a great way to drive targeted traffic to your website and they provide instant results. However, to make your PPC ad campaigns work for you, you will need to do some keyword research and spend some time working with your campaigns and landing pages for your ads. Doing so can not only drive targeted traffic to your website, but it can also improve your website’s conversion rate dramatically.

How PPC Works

When people first began to advertise online, webmasters are paid for banner ad impressions. This means that every time someone saw an ad on a website, the advertiser paid for that impression whether someone clicked on an ad or not. Now, with PPC ads, webmasters only pay for their banner ads when someone clicks on an ad and visits their site. This makes ad campaigns far easier to track and provides a much better return on investment than the impression system.

Find the Right Keywords

One of the most important parts of ensuring your PPC campaign’s success is finding the right keywords for your ads. PPC campaigns work by showing particular ads alongside search results. However, if the keywords you select do not match your ads and your website, your campaign will not provide the traffic you are looking for.Choosing the right keywords will not only improve your ad’s click-through rate, but it is also important to your conversion rate. When people click on your ads, they are expecting content that is relevant to what they searched for. If your landing page doesn’t fit their needs, they are likely to leave immediately. Additionally, you will have more success selecting keywords that are specific. For example, if your website sells cat food, you will want to select keywords like “buy cat food online” instead of generic keywords like “pet food.”

Match Your Ads to Your Landing Pages

Another important part of your PPC ad campaign is ensuring that your landing pages match your ads. The most successful PPC campaigns do not use ads to send people to the homepage of a website; instead, people are directed to landing pages. Landing pages have content that is specific to the ad and the keywords associated with the ad. This ensures that people who click on ads will see content that is specific to their keyword search, which is important since many people will leave a website if they do not see what they are looking for immediately.

Monitor Your Campaigns

The way that people search is constantly changing, along with current information. It is important that you monitor your PPC campaigns to ensure that they are still providing you the traffic and results that you are expecting. Additionally, it can be very helpful to adjust keyword associations and ad content occasionally to see if particular combinations have more success. Since you can change ad settings on the fly and can adjust your daily click-through rates to be as high or low as you would like, you can test new campaigns without worrying about breaking your advertising budget.

Category: Marketing, Website Tips