Are you making this mistake with pay per click advertising?

April 4, 2008 by Matt Eve
Filed under: Uncategorized 

By now just about every business owner should be aware of the opportunity to promote their business using search engine pay per click advertising. Of these by far the largest and well known is the Adwords service from Google.

Knowing about it is one thing actually doing it is another, and doing it really well is a whole different ball game. All too often I see pay per click advertisers pretty much throwing away good money. They may be feeling good about having gotten themselves set up with pay per click but they should have taken the time to really master the service.

The number one mistake I see people making is having their pay per click adverts simply linking to the homepage of their website. Google provides so much analytical information that doing this is a real waste of money. To really maximise your chances of getting a good return on investment you need to design specific targetted pages which match very closely with what your target market are searching for.

For example lets say that you own a DIY hardware shop and one of the things you do is sell drills. A lot of business owners would make the mistake of setting up an adwords campaign using keywords such as “drills”, “drilling” etc and then linking the advert to the main homepage of their website.

This is the equivalent of someone coming into the DIY shop,asking if you sell drills and telling them to go back to the front of the store and find it themselves. You wouldn’t do it offline so why do it online? What you would do would be to at least take them to the power tool section or better still to the drill subsection.

You should therefore do the same on the web. If someone has searched for a specific term then the closer the page you send them to matches their search criteria the greater the chances of converting them will be. So in this instance you would have a specific page (known as a landing page) which would give full details on drills and which would keep the tight focus that they had in their original search.

Knowing exactly what keywords that people have searched on to then click on your pay per click adverts is one of the most helpful pieces of information you could ever hope to know when marketing your business online. Don’t waste the opportunity by sending your customers back to the front door!

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