No matter how developed and well managed a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign is, your website (or landing page) must match the message and value proposition associated with that campaign.  You can drive the most targeted visitors possible through a strong PPC campaign but if your website cannot deliver on the message from the PPC ads, you will miss out on customers.  In addition, site usability plays a large role.

I have been working with a client for about a year and a half on their PPC campaigns and was constantly persuading them to re-design their website.  I had always felt that our campaign results were being hindered because their site wasn’t user friendly and didn’t match up with what they wanted to promote through PPC.  We developed a targeted campaign and managed that campaign closely for many months.  My client was happy with the overall results but I continued to feel we could do better if their website was improved.  Finally, they decided to re-design the site and chose MoreVisibility for the task.  We had a unique advantage in re-designing the website because we were so familiar with their products and services after managing their PPC campaigns for over a year.

The new website has been live for about a month and the increased productivity of our PPC campaigns cannot be overstated.  We only had to make a few minor tweaks to ad copy and keywords in order to match up the message between the new site and the updated PPC campaign.  In the previous 30 days (just prior to launch) we had 77 conversions from our PPC campaign.  For the same time frame, with the new site and updated campaign we had 118 conversions, an increase of 53%.  In addition, my client’s most important conversion metric (New Quote Requests) had an increase of 106%.  These are powerful reminders that where you drive the traffic (website or landing page) from your PPC campaign is just as important as the keywords you select, the ad copy you develop, and your overall campaign strategy.

In the not so distant future, there will be a new search engine out there for you to try simply called Bing (www.bing.com).  It’s the “next big thing” in search engine technology brought to you by Microsoft.  With Bing, Microsoft will once again try to take a bite out of Google’s search market share, but will it succeed where others failed?  I have my doubts of Bing’s success and it has nothing to do with its technology, or its performance.  In my opinion, Google simply owns search like no other business in the world.  When your very company name becomes a common verb in the English language, you have reached rarified air in gaining mindshare with your users.  C’mon, you have never asked someone (or told someone) to “just Google it” to find an answer online?  Will people one day say, “just Bing it”?  If they do, and I have my reservations about this, then yes, Microsoft through its Bing search engine will be successful.

According to the slick video currently displayed on Bing.com – well the video is actually hosted on www.decisionengine.com, but you get to the video from the Find Out More button on the Bing homepage - Bing is more than a search engine, it’s a “decision engine”.  Instead of sorting the search results based on popularity (is that a dig at Google), the Bing search engine sorts them by ‘logical categories”.  Well, who decides what is logical?  Anyway, I am not here to beat up the technology behind Bing, it was created and developed by people much smarter than myself.  And it has some excellent features built in like Price Predictor, which actually tells you when to buy an airline ticket in order to help get you the best price.  But will people actually use this “decision engine”?

According to the open letter on www.decisionengine.com/Letter.html from the Bing Team, Microsoft, “So far in 2009, there are four and a half websites created EVERY SECOND as the web continues to expand.  While more searchable information is cool, nearly half of all searches don’t result in the answer that people are seeking… We took a new approach to go beyond search to build what we call a decision engine. With a powerful set of intuitive tools on top of a world class search service, Bing will help you make smarter, faster decisions. We included features that deliver the best results, presented in a more organized way to simplify key tasks and help you make important decisions faster.”

That sounds great and I will give it a try, but then again I am in the search marketing industry and it is in my best interest to give it a full test drive.  But will the average person, sitting at home on their pc or laptop go to Bing instead of Google?  I am sure Microsoft is going to pour millions into an aggressive marketing campaign…but will that message get through in the long run?  It’s an interesting question and I will be following all of the hoopla.  I remember a day when I would go to Yahoo.com to look something up.  I don’t remember when I switched to Google for all my searches (but it happened) and now I don’t remember the last time I used a search engine other than Google (outside of work, of course)!

If you’ve ever managed a Pay-per-Click (PPC) campaign you probably ran into the situation where your campaigns were tracking to go over budget.  Google, for example, allows up to 20% increase in ad delivery on high traffic days for AdWords campaigns.  If you experience a few of these days during the early part of the month, you could be faced with making decisions on how to stretch out your ad delivery in the month’s final days.  Do you turn off your campaigns altogether and wait for the next month to start?  Do you only run the most profitable keywords; if so, what are they?  Do you change the ad delivery so your ads only run during the day or night, weekday or weekends?  A good way to determine which strategy is best is to analyze your Google Analytics (GA) data (assuming you have a GA account).

You can leverage the data captured in Google Analytics to identify your top producing keywords.  In addition, you can run specific reports in Google Analytics to identify what times of the day your PPC keywords convert the best.  Google Analytics can help you identify the optimum time to run your ads, the best mix of keywords for Return on Investment (ROI), and the geo-targeting areas to deliver those ads.

Next time you need to make decisions about your PPC campaign when targeting a budget, take advantage of the market intelligence Google Analytics can provide.  Here are three reports that can help you make smarter campaign decisions:

1. In the Google Analytics main dashboard, click on Visitors Map Overlay to identify the local, state and or national areas to focus your campaign.  If your budget requires a more narrow focus, this report can help you geo-target your ads.
2. In the Google Analytics main dashboard, click on Traffic Sources Google/cpc choose the Dimension “Keyword” to help identify your top producing keywords.  Whichever metric you feel is most representative of success (E-commerce, lead generation, site usage) can be sorted in descending order for a quick reference of your best keywords.
3. In the Google Analytics main dashboard, click on Goals Total Conversions or Conversion Rate and at the top right of the main graph click on the Clock Icon to see the peak times your campaigns convert.

Once you have the business intelligence from these reports, you can make sharp decisions on which keywords to pause and which to keep running when you are up against a firm budget. In addition, you can focus your ad delivery to specific geo-target locations and dictate the times of day to run your ads.  These campaign changes can help maximize your advertising dollars when you need to find ways to stay within your monthly budget.