Understanding PPC Marketing And Branding

The pay per click industry has been continually evolving over the years. In fact, experts say that businesses can now exploit this medium for their branding initiatives. Branding is simply the process of creating the identity of a product, service, or company to ultimately attract new customers and keep old ones.

Any business can put up effective promotions for branding using any PPC network. Author Boris Mordkovich, of the book "Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Marketing Handbook" gives out some guidelines for managing a branding campaign using PPC marketing.

He encourages all PPC advertisers to monitor their branding campaign regularly and tweak the strategy as they go; varying the ads only slightly can have a significant impact on results, and this is a strategy that many successful PPC and Google Adwords advertisers use regularly in order to optimize their efforts. Some of the best ways to tap into this opportunity for your branding campaign involve:

1. Treat PPC advertising as separate from conventional ad campaigns. Pay per click campaigns are very different from conventional marketing. The goal is to get a response from customers but the information you get from PPC is different. Isolate your PPC campaign from your other marketing efforts to increase your efficiency and effectiveness in PPC advertising.

2. Place special emphasis on keywords, not on your USP. Conventional marketing dictates the use of a unique selling proposition in a marketing campaign. PPC advertising is all about the keywords and keyphrases being searched by your target market. You would not be able to target the right market if you don't speak the language of your customers. Take the time to uncover these keywords and phrases and use them in creating your ads.

3. Adjust your strategy regularly. The great thing about this advertising method is that you can get accurate metrics about your campaign almost in real-time. Take advantage of this by optimizing your ads regularly for more clicks and better results.

4. Develop the right landing page. Customers have very short attention span, especially in the internet. You don't want to send them to your homepage that just talks about your company in general. Consider developing a landing page that gives out detailed information about your ad's subject. This grabs the attention of your customers and makes it easier for you to obtain more accurate campaign metrics.

5. Produce innovative ad headlines and copy. You are just one of the countless businesses that are vying for the attention of your customers through PPC. Stand out from the crowd by writing exceptional ads. Think about the benefits of hiring a copywriter; you can get better results if you let a copywriter do his magic in those few lines of text.

Tips to Track Conversions from Google Adwords

The next step after you've selected your keywords and written a compelling ad is to track your conversions. Any Adwords campaign would not be successful if users do not have the tools for tracking conversions.

You have the option of simply using your landing page hits and number of sales from a link to analyze your conversions. But it's also worth looking at the tools Google provide its Adwords users for acquiring conversion data. Here are some tips and guidelines for using Google's conversion tracking tools.

First, you'll need to embed your conversion link using JavaScript. If you are using a shopping cart or other type of setup where the buyer receives a confirmation as part of their checkout process, your best bet is to use some JavaScript code that gets sent back to the Google Adwords tracker.

This tool allows you to track the ads that clicked through and produced a complete conversion; bear in mind that this tool does not allow you to see the number of visitors to the site. Just place the few lines of code into your website, and then access your conversion tracking reports directly on the 'Campaign Summary' page in the Reports Center of Google Adwords.

Conversion tracking will only produce accurate results if you meet these two conditions: First is that you must be running approved Adwords ads on your site. The second condition is only your conversion page should contain the tracking code.

You can verify if the code is working by completing a complete conversion yourself. If you can find out exactly when a user has clicked on your ad and completed the conversion process, you can review your conversion reports within 24 hours and see the click-through on the report summary. Avoid clicking your own ads, as this is a breach of the Google Adwords terms of service contract.

If you are using PayPal or another payment checkout system, you can still track conversions by setting up your Google Adwrods conversion tracker correctly. All you need to do in this case is set up a conversion confirmation web page within PayPal; you can then insert the Google Adwords JavaScript code directly into the web page. Whenever a customer completes the PayPal or other shopping cart process, you'll have a record of their visit, and, most importantly, the conversion.

Authors Sarah Milstein, J.D. Biersdorfer and Mathew McDonald of the book "Google: The Missing Manual", emphasize the importance of determining your total cost-per-conversion for every campaign at any given time.

This information will let you understand how much it actually costs to generate your sale; you can calculate this by using the free conversion-tracking tools and matching the number of conversions up with the total cost of your campaign for any given period of time. To calculate this, you will need to produce a summary report of keyword purchases at the end of each month and divide the number of conversions by your total costs to run the ad.