Do Pay-Per-Click Ads Really Work? 5 Ideas to Improve Your Click-Through and Conversion Rates

Written by John Demar
Published: July 3, 2008

Many site owners look to pay-per-click advertising to increase their site’s exposure on the web and attract customers.  There are many options to choose from for PPC, and creating an effective PPC strategy for your business takes some work, patience, and knowledge.  To make it the most successful for your site, consider these five tips.

1. Keyword choice is perhaps the most important attribute and the most frequently misunderstood. Many keywords require high bid amounts and may not result in high quality traffic for you. Consider keywords that are targeted to your specific business, geographic location, or unique products or services for best results. Be sure to research your keywords in major search engines to assess the types of sites that use them, the amount of competition for those words, and other words that might be related and possible more useful to your business.
   
   
2. Set limits for the spending on your ad campaigns. It's very easy to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars a month on keyword campaigns. Unless you need immediate traffic to your site, set a low daily or monthly budget for your campaign and assess the results on a small scale. That way, you can tweak your campaigns as you go to learn which keywords are most successful.
   
   
3. Use the reporting tools of your PPC control panel to review the results of your campaigns with valuable statistics such as number of impressions, keywords that attracted visitors to your site, ad ranking against other sites.
   
   
4. Choose your bid amounts to achieve the highest ranking possible for the lowest cost. Some keywords might have high competition and therefore are costly to place bid to get good positioning. For some competitive categories, such as personal injury law and real estate, it make take $10 to $15 bids and often higher to place highly in ad results. Many times, less frequently used words may allow higher placement and more clicks for a lower cost.
   
   
5. Review statistics gathered over a period of several months to spot trends in keywords, monthly impressions, average ad ranking, and monthly clicks. Without regular examination of these important facts, there’s no way to adequately identify strengths and weaknesses in your campaigns and determine what changes are needed to improve them. Changes made without meaningful data may even hurt your campaigns.
   
   

PPC campaigns can and do succeed when approached with the right reporting and research techniques – the billions of dollar per year spent on them are a testament to their effectiveness.  Employing these five ideas should help you to lower your cost per click and increasing your site traffic while staying within your budget.