Did you catch us Live last Tuesday chatting about The Games, Hilary Clinton, Census and most importantly Paid Search? You missed us!? That’s ok, I can forgive you this one time. If you did miss us it’s your lucky day because I’ve summarised the three magic rules of paid search just for you.
Rule 1: Don’t make your customer work hard
We once worked with a publisher who had serious issues with their paid search strategy!! I analysed their search strategy and found that the landing page was about three clicks away from the conversion point. There was a pretty clear solution to this problem and that was to make the landing page only one click from the conversion point. This not only improved the conversion rate by 300%, it brought the price per click down from $97 dollars to the $11 mark.
Listen closely friends, when you invest in pay per click advertising don’t just take visitors to your homepage!! Take them to a specific landing page dedicated to the campaign. Your customer is searching for something specific! Don’t make them navigate through your site in order to find what they are looking for. If they have to work for it then it’s going to feel unnatural and that’s where you will lose the customer. You’ve already spent the money to get them on your site, don’t muck around with it!
Rule 2: Don’t pay too much
Paid search can be real daunting for some businesses and you’ll find that if someone offers a magic solution you are more than willing to throw your money at them! A lot of businesses don’t have a huge budget to dedicate to search so it’s important to spend your money wisely and not attempt a blanket strategy. I generally like to audit my pay per click account at least once a month to analyse what clicks are actually leading to conversions and which ones are dead ends. This helps me optimise my search strategy and put my money where it’s really going to make an impact.
Rule 3: Grab Genuine Buying Traffic
Although you want to capture some researcher traffic in your search strategy you want to make sure that customers actually looking to buy are at the forefront of your attention. By using longtail keywords in your paid search strategy you are targeting genuine customers. For example, if someone was looking to book a Contiki trip they might first search ‘Contiki’, this will come back with millions of results. They will then edit their search to ‘Europe Contiki’ and then to ‘Europe Contiki under 30’s’, ‘Europe Contiki under 30’s cheap’…..and so on. The more refined their search is the more genuine the enquiry is. By investing in longtail keywords you are investing in customers who are ready to make a purchase.
On the other side of the dice there is researcher traffic which is also very important for gaining the trust of customers and nurturing them through their journey. A customer’s journey should not be considered as linear from the time of first impression to point of purchase. It is actually a cycle where you need to be constantly nurturing customer loyalty and encouraging a strong referral system.
Ok, now you know the magic rules of paid search go out there and build on your strategy! Also for all the social media gurus out there I have a juicy blog post for you about Instagram’s very Snapchat-like new update.