Are PPC Advertising Mistakes Costing You?

Advertising on PPC (pay per click) sites such as Adword or adSense can be a very cost effective, if you sit up your campaigns correctly. Yet there are many pitfalls along the way for the inexperienced beginner.

As more and more people turn to these forms of advertising to run affiliate programs, or just to acquire traffic to their own websites, the mistakes of these experimental marketers succeed in only lining the pockets of PPC providers.

This is why it is imperative that any would be marketer thoroughly research the secrets behind successful PPC Pros. Such things as choosing the right landing pages, how to uncover the correct keywords for campaigns, learning how to write adverts not only to catch the customers eye, but also to lower cost. I will be covering many of these secrets in this blog, still there are way too many to discuss here in a single article.

One of the biggest mistakes almost every new Marketer makes is giving customers too many choices. Throughout our lives we have been programmed to believe that variety and multiple choices are important to the consumer. While this is very true in your local department store, it just isn’t the same in online commerce.

Normally once an online shopper decides to buy they know the exact product or at least the features of the product they want. Usually by the time they are ready to make a purchase, all of their research has been completed.

So what happens? You have a customer searching for the best price on a J-45 Gibson Acoustic Guitar. While searching the internet your advert shows up and catches his eye. Yet when he clicks on the PPC advertisement you send him to a page listing 20 different models of guitars or worst the home page.

At this point it is very easy for your would be customer to hit the back button. Sure what he was looking for was in there, and you very well could have had the best price around. But sadly he will never see it, by clicking the back button he has already moved on and you get to pay for the click.

In another scenario, a customer clicks on your ad and visits your landing page, here again without choosing the best landing page for your advert; the customer looks around for a bit. Your site does have some great prices and the selection is impressive, but by offering so many choices no one item stands out. There is not an insensitive to purchase model J-200 or any other model.

Often when faced with too many choices internet shoppers will make a mental note of your site and prom ice themselves to return. Unfortunately with millions of websites on the web few ever do.

In PPC advertising the landing page which you direct a customer to should have as few choices as possible. It is not unheard of to build your own landing page in affiliate marketing. An advertising webpage, without any navigation or distractions, which has but one sole objective, to sell a single product.

Such pages should be built with the goal of persuading a purchase in the first few short paragraphs. Research has shown that when investigating or shopping online most people read a webpage from top to bottom in an “F” pattern. Thoroughly reading the first few paragraphs, and then scanning down the left side a distance before reading again. Followed up by scanning the remainder of the article.

When building your own landing page you should 2 or more links to the actual product page with your affiliate id, and the first link should always be before the fold. (This is to say that the link should be present without having to scroll down.)

Another must for your landing pages is some sort of analytics to track your visitors. An excellent program which I suggest is Web-stat. With this service you receive live up to the minute statistics on your visitors and you are able to set up the analytics to provide you with the information on which link your customer uses to leave your page.

They offer a 30 day Free trial of this service without any limitations. To read more about this amazing service click here.

An added benefit to using a paid analytic service which provides you with details of the IP addresses of visitors which frequent your page is the prevention of click fraud. Click Fraud occurs when your PPC advert is repeatedly clicked by the same person in an effort to drive up your cost or run you out of the market.

Also by optimizing your own landing page for search engines you can acquire free traffic, which you can then direct to the product line of your affiliate program. A couple of excellent SEO software programs are IB Promoter and WebCEO.

Although these are just a few pointers on building a mistake free ad campaign, in the future I hope to bring you many more. If you have any questions feel free to contact me by using the “Contact ENC Hosting Blog” link on my blog page.

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