By Kelly Larsen, Director of Marketing, PPC Summit
Now that the holidays are upon us, most advertisers are pumping ad dollars into their campaigns in hopes of reaching more buyers. Even though we are still in an economic slump, market indicators show that sales stand to improve as more people than ever before are expected to shop online in the next two months, according to a recent Forrester Research study. This is promising for Pay Per Click (PPC) marketers as consumers are increasingly buying and researching online, but it’s important to know where consumers are REALLY spending their dollars. Today more shoppers are buying ‘customer-centric’ brands rather than ‘product-centric’ brands. Learning your customer habits, anticipating their future buying patterns and finding new ways to add value will give your online marketing strategy a boost especially during the holidays.
Here Are Some Tips To Help Drive Your Pay Per Click Sales This Holiday Season
Get Inside Your Buyers’ Heads
Wonder why visitors are bouncing away from your site or landing page and then buying from your competitor? Go beyond the numbers and start studying your customer’s buying behavior to understand what pushes them to purchase your product or service. An important thing to keep in mind is making sure your web site copy touts your product benefits—not features. This is such a simple marketing strategy but it bears repeating because so many etailers get caught up in what their product is all about that they forget why prospects buy. Prospects generally buy because of what a product or service can do for them – not because it is feature rich (ie, cheaper, bigger etc.).
Do Your Keyword Research
Make sure you are targeting the RIGHT keywords – for your current offer. One of the biggest mistakes PPC marketers make is being too general when selecting keywords. This is particularly important for etailers and merchants with wide product lines.
For example, if you run an online shoe store that caters to the whole family, don’t select keywords that drive them to your home page. Get them to the specific product pages so that they can find the item that they are searching for immediately. If you’re having a holiday special on kids’ shoes, select keywords for this; for women’s shoes, do another ad for this; etc.
In short, be specific with your keyword selection. While you may get fewer clicks, your ROI will increase because the leads are super targeted.
Create A Specific Call to Action
Many pay per click marketers waste great PPC ads because they end with a weak call to action. An example of this goes something like, “Click to learn more.”
Call to action statements should be strong, direct and specific:
> Buy Today and Save 10%
> Subscribe to Receive a FREE Gift
> Sign Up for Free Holiday Shipping
These types of call-to-action statements implore the potential customer to take a specific action.
Many retailers will offer free shipping this year in the belief that it will make them more attractive in this recessionary holiday season, but if everyone in your channel is offering it, that won’t allow you to stand out. Think about what your customers are looking for that allows you to stand out and then focus on that benefit heavily in your PPC ads.
In conclusion, pay per click marketing is simple. The basics don’t change. If you keep these three pieces of advice in mind when writing your ads, you’ll get more bang for your buck this holiday season!
P.S. We’re holding our first ever and highly anticipated AdWords Advantage Online Summit on January 12-28. Don’t miss this 3-week online training event, go to www.AdWordsAdvantage.com to learn more.
Great post! When possible I like to include delivery date information in either landing page or ad copy or both especially in the days just before Christmas. i.e. Delivery before Christmas.
Many of our clients have e-commerce sites as well as social networks. The biggest issue is estimating and evaluating the costs for PPC. Of course this changes with the type of products they sell, their web strategy and keywords they are targetting but overall there should be some type of a ratio we could use for our clients to better understand what they have to invest in order to get back the results they are trying to achieve.
For instance if a client wants to go from 500k in sales to 1 million, should he invest 10 or 20 or more % in PPC, are there any overall guidelines and “before” and “after” type stats to perhaps find patterns and best baseline.
Another info that would be helpful is to gather factual documented data on certain type of businesses and their marketing strategy % wise for instance:
Client name:
Prior traffic: XXX
Prior budget: XXX
20% of budget goes to social media
25% goes to PPC
25% offline
and so on
After x amount of time results:
Current traffic:XXX
Current budget: XXX
ROI from each area.
Aside from marketing companies that specialize in research, I’d love to hear real examples and how people have achieved them.
The above comments are great but very basic for someone in the industry so I would love to hear more ideas on ways to drive traffic beyond the basics and RESULTS from those actions so we can help our clients who come to us to build great websites and ensure those sites sell for them
Thanks
Marzena
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