A Stop & Go Guide to Buying Traffic (First Time PPC)
So it’s been a few months now, and your online marketing efforts aren’t performing as well as you would have hoped. What do you do next? Running paid traffic to your landing page could be the answer, it’s certainly an effective way of establishing an online presence and getting your landing pages noticed. But if you go into it rashly; thinking it will be a quick-fix solution, then it could prove to be a costly mistake.
Here’s a few things to Stop and think about before you Go ahead and start paying for traffic:
1. You’ve never used Google AdWords until now
When it comes to buying traffic via Google AdWords, you’ll want to make sure you have a decent Quality Score, as this is what lowers the cost of competitive keyword bidding. Quality Score is determined by a number of factors, click-through-rate being the most influential.
New AdWords account holders will have no existing history of their click-through-rate – which will either be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how well you’re landing pages have been performing prior to this point. This means you’ll have to build one up, the quicker the better, by bidding high on keywords to begin with and making sure your landing pages are top in the search engine rankings.
Bear in mind that this will mean spending more money at the start. After a while though, and depending on how successfully you’ve managed to increase your click-through-rate, your Quality Score should improve and the cost of your keyword bidding will begin to go down.
2. Think about your goal: Awareness vs Lead Generation
The end-game of driving more people to your landing page might be the same, but your reasons for doing so are entirely different. If your goal is to increase awareness about your brand/company in general, you may want to cast a wider net when it comes to keywords – broader matches that will drive a lot of diverse traffic and maximise your online exposure.
Broad keyword matches are typically avoided, they tend to drive a lot of ‘irrelevant’ traffic because they’re not specific enough, but if your only goal is getting noticed then it’s probably not a bad idea. After all, if keywords are less sought-after then they’re going to be less expensive to bid on.
One thing that broad keyword matches is not recommended for, is lead generation. If your goal is to capture data and drive sales, you’re going to want to attract customers who are relevant to your product/service. This will require the use of exact keyword matches, honing in on very specific keywords so that your ad relevance is higher, as is a user’s likelihood to click.
While we’re on the subject, it would also be a smart move to bid on any negative keywords that you don’t want to get found for. A prime example for this might be ‘jobs’ or ‘hiring’, etc. A lot of people performing search queries for a job in a sector similar to yours might end up landing on your page otherwise, and these kinds of misunderstandings will skew your bounce rate to click-through-rate ratio.
3. Determine which terms are already driving traffic
Before you go blindly picking keywords you think might work best for you, take a look at which search terms are already driving significant traffic to your landing page. If you’re using Google Analytics, look at the “Traffic Sources” section for information about the types of keywords people have already searched to come across your landing page.
Image: Search terms currently driving page traffic (source. Google Analytics)
While it won’t be a comprehensive list – search terms performed while users are logged into a Google account (Google Plus, Maps, Chrome, GMail, etc) can’t be tracked and therefore won’t get pulled into Google Analytics – there should still be sufficient information to get you started. Google AdWord’s “Keyword Tools” can then be used to suggest similar, ‘tighter’ search terms that might be more effective.
Image: Suggested keywords/keyword groups based on existing search terms currently driving traffic (source. Google AdWords)
Summary
- Paying for traffic will not guarantee an increase in revenue or lead generation. But it can deliver significant results when utlized correctly.
- First-time AdWords users will need to spend money before they make money, in order to establish a decent Quality Score and reduce keyword bidding costs for the future.
- The types of keywords you bid on will depend on your marketing goals. There’s a big difference between brand awareness and aquiring relevant, paying customers.
- Determine which search terms are currently driving traffic before you decide which keywords to buy.
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