Inside Track - Marketing Tips and Tricks

Is your web site working for you?

Part I : Pay per click -  Is it right for me?

A popular way to direct traffic to your site is purchasing specific key words, or combinations of words (“key phrases”), and paying every time people “click” on your advertisement posted in a search engine’s results. These so-called “pay-per-click” campaigns can be really effective, and if used along with optimizing your organic search results ranking, you can see a return on your investment fast.

Key word Selection – Be Specific
The more specific you can make your keywords, the better chance you have of driving the right folks to your site. Ideally, you want to choose words that maximize traffic, but have the least possible competition for clicks. For example, if you are a cosmetic surgeon in McLean, VA, you may choose “cosmetic surgeon northern VA” or “plastic surgeon McLean,VA”. Choosing “doctor” and “Virginia” will lump your business with a much larger subset of other providers, so it important to make sure you add one or two high-specificity words to make it easier for your interested prospects to find you.

Ad Writing – What’s the hook?
So now you’ve chose your keywords, you’ll also have a small, character-limited, adspace to get your point across to potential customers. Here’s where you should test a couple of different campaigns, run simultaneously, to see which works best to produce results.

A few important considerations for writing ad-copy:

• Be concise – well, you only have a limited number of characters, so this is kind of  done for you.
• Tie in your keywords – if there is a disconnect between your ad and you keywords, you will get a low click-through rate.
• Be rhythmic, or melodic – think about radio jingles and slogans for large companies. They roll off the tongue effortlessly. People naturally gravitate towards that “sing-song” style.

Advantages
Pay-per-click programs do have their advantages. They are relatively inexpensive to setup, allowing you test a few different campaigns simultaneously using different keywords to see which work best. They are also easy to turn on and off, so in a perfect world, if you start getting too much business from these ads, you can throttle the traffic by turning the ads off when you’re swamped with potential customers, and back on again when you need to re-energize your marketing during a slump. This also allows you to control the cost of a campaign.

Disadvantages
Probably the biggest disadvantage is that you do have to pay for every click, and depending on the competition for the keywords you use, this can add up. And, keep in mind, clicks and visits to your web site are only valuable if you are able to convert the business. So, make sure that your ads accurately describe the services and value you provide and have a web site that keeps your prospects engaged.