Intelligent PPC

A Picture Is Worth 1000 Words!

One of the more esoteric aspects of paid ad management is day-parting. It’s hard to explain. It’s hard to analyze. Different platforms support day-parting in different ways. And not everyone calls it the same thing. Day-parting is confusing. But day-parting a landing page? That’s a concept that doesn’t naturally occur to us.

Let’s say you have an item you want to sell, but it’s an item that’s better in demonstration than in print – you can make a better impact by showing a video clip than by writing an explanation in text on the landing page for your ads. There are lots of times where this could be true; just look at www.willitblend.com and watch the dude put an iPhone or a sneaker into the blender he’s selling. That is way more effective than writing a description about how powerful the blender is.

Once you make the decision to feature video on your landing page, there’s one more question – do you make the video auto-play or do you make the user click to play it? The answer is “it depends.” Practical wisdom tells us that people shop at work when they aren’t supposed to. If you’re selling an item that gets good PPC traffic during the day, but you suspect auto-launching a noisy video will attract unwanted attention, you should allow the user to click to play. The problem is once the evening traffic sets in, it’s often not only OK, it’s more effective to auto-play the video.

Day-Part Landing Pages

Make two versions of the page, one with a click-to-play video and one with an auto-play video. Set up one campaign with a day-parting schedule for “work hours” and use the click-to-play page as the landing page.  Duplicate that campaign, change the ad schedule for “after hours” and land those ads on the auto-play landing page.

Presto. You have day-parted landing pages.

Of course, you will want to test for the optimal times for using auto-play versus click-to-play, but the work time/after hours divider should provide a good place to start. And video isn’t the only thing that merits day-part landing page testing. There may be instances where a text-intensive page about house-painting consistently converts better than a graphics-intensive page at 9AM on Saturday because more users are more apt to read details on that subject then as they prepare to go to the paint store.

Think like a consumer. What times of day (or days of the week) are you more likely to be interested in lots of detail? What times of day are you more likely to be interested in brevity? You’re a shopper too, you know. You can use your own tendencies and those of friends and relatives as a guideline for establishing your test times. Then learn how to use the Adwords hourly and daily reporting to figure out what works during which specific time periods for various criteria – time of day, day of the week, even day of the month. For example, any grandmother can tell you that you have garage sales on a pay-day weekends where people are more likely to have disposable income and you run your ad in the newspaper on Thursday. Look for those kinds of patterns online as well.

This gives your A/B testing a whole new dimension.

This week there’s a conference going on in New Orleans where people from advertising are debating the fate of the industry. There’s one group who predicts online ad shrinkage and another group who insists that online ads are the only accountable ad form. There’s even one group who thinks Twitter will replace Google Search.

PPC advertising has already demonstrated some shrinkage due to the economy. But why would businesses cut back on an ad model that’s almost completely transparent and has nearly total accountability in favor of “traditional” ad methods like television, print and direct mail, which are largely faith-based efforts? You got me – I don’t get it.

• Proof
• The Ad Medium
• Web Analytics

With many chores, there is a certain order in which you have to perform various tasks or your outcome will be disappointing. For example, when you clean your house, if you start out vacuuming the floor right off the bat before you’ve dusted, and before you’ve picked up other things out of the floor, your vacuuming effort will not be as effective and you will have to come behind yourself and do it again to get it done right, after all the other cleaning has been finished. The thing is that for many people, vacuuming is the least tedious part of the job and the one they want to dive into.

Launching a PPC account is like vacuuming. It’s probably the least tedious part of the entire pay per click campaign, but it’s not the first thing you should do. If you jump into building keyword lists and ad groups and writing ads right off the bat, you are skipping a couple of really important steps that are necessary to ensure that you don’t waste your PPC budget right out of the gate. The most important of these steps that gets skipped on a regular basis is the development of converting landing pages. Stop and read that last sentence again – it says converting landing pages. Remember that – we’ll come back to that in a bit.

Many PPC advertisers forget that once the ad gets clicked on, the shopper is in freefall – what they do after that click (which has cost you money) is totally dependent on where they land.

Why Do I Need This “landing page” You Speak Of?

Usually, the first thing a new PPC campaign builder does is build a keyword list. Usually, these keywords lists are extensive, because even after years of admonition, the general opinion is that you need a huge keyword list to do well with pay per click ads. We’ll cover what’s wrong with that kind of thinking later. For now, you have a keyword list that you’re stuffing with everything you can think of that a person could possibly type in when looking for the things you sell. Now it’s time to write ads and you need a destination URL – www.mysite.com, yeah that works, let’s use that.

What’s wrong with this picture? To begin with, let’s step away from the role of advertiser and look at what happens when you’re a shopper using a search engine.

If a shopper plops into your site’s main page but they clicked on a specific part number, or an item name, or even just a brand, they’re going to be irritated that they now have to look for that item and it’s not all that likely that they will stick around long enough to do that – after all, the logic for the shopper is: “if someone wanted my business badly enough to PAY for an ad on this stupid part number, why didn’t they take the time to put me in the right place when I got here?” Someone who caters to get the click, but who doesn’t bother to take the time to make sure their shopper ends up in the spot most appropriate to what they clicked on sends a bad message to the shopper – they cared more about the click than about servicing the customer. In the minds of many online shoppers, this translates into “they just want the sale, they don’t care about my needs. This is bad service.” That not only becomes a wasted click, that is the beginning of an antagonistic relationship that you now will have to overcome, assuming they don’t leave your site immediately after getting there.

I Only Sell One Thing – Why Can’t I Use My Main Page?

The landing page of a PPC account has basically one job – to make the sale. If you have a site that sells thousands of items that people will look for by part number, you could be fine having internal catalog pages as destination URLs for ads that serve in ad groups where those parts are in the keyword list. But what if you sell a service like landscaping? Your pay per click campaign becomes a lead generation service. Since every click costs money, your landing page has a very specific job – to collect the lead. That’s all. The landing page needs to be designed to do whatever it takes to convince the user to give you their contact information. Face it, most “home” pages are not designed to do anything but talk nice about your product or service, then shuffle them off to the proper section for further activity. That’s not enough for generating leads from PPC ads.

You have to design a page that accomplishes a lot in a small space - you have to convey your specific value to the user, you have to explain why you’re the best source from which to obtain that value, you have to convey your trustworthiness, and you have to offer adequate incentive in order to get the user’s contact information. Probably about half the time, you simply won’t be able to get all of this information plus the contact form into a single page view but you can put up several different landing pages focusing on different aspects. If one outperforms the others, you might want to refine that one and use it exclusively for that ad group. But until you create and test a few pages that are designed from the ground up specifically to collect this contact info from the user, you won’t be able to realize the full potential of your paid ad campaign.

Is That All?

Of course, there is a little more to it than having a page able to make the sale. You also have to have a page that makes the grade – the Quality Score mechanics on the paid ad platforms will “read” your landing pages and rate them on keyword relevance, editorial guidelines, and load time. You’ll need to remember that spiders don’t read words in images, so textual content has to be present in order for your pages to be deemed relevant. And the relevance is connective – keywords have relevance to ads and landing pages, ads have relevance to words and landing pages, landing pages have relevance to words and ad text.

Group your keywords tightly so that they are relevant to one another, write your ads so that they accurately reflect the keywords in the group, and build your landing page so that it’s relevant to the words in the group because that’s what searchers will be typing in when they see the ad. You don’t want to break the congruence between the searcher’s thought process and the final landing point. If they click on your ad and then once on your site have any question about why they landed on the page they’re on, you broke the chain.

If you have issues with conversion, remember, that’s the landing page’s job. If you don’t take the time at the beginning of the process to develop landing pages that are able to convert (get a sale, collect an email address, etc), then no matter how extensive your keyword list is, or how catchy your ads are, all you’ve done is cost yourself money and effort because you didn’t first ensure that those users land in a place designed to make the most of their motivation. It’s like vacuuming the floor then dusting off that grimy ceiling fan…

Check out the preceeding article about understanding PPC systems, posted on Metric Voodoo