2008 PPC Learnings

2008.
With 2008 coming to a close,have you reflect back regarding your search campaigns in 2008 ? What can you learn and leverage for 2009 ?

Here's some learnings to share for 2008:

Daily Budget:
How better to blow your budget overnight ?
- Setting a newly revised daily budget and going for a holiday, going for a few day retreat, ignoring the budget over the weekend. Get ready to burn off your budget when you try the above mention.

Keywords
- Bidding on high click through keywords which has zero or very low conversion rates.
- Over bidding on keywords without having taken into consideration of your revenue / profit per conversion.
- Paying for negative keywords without knowing (Failure to run the reports in identifying the negative keywords which are costing you money but zero / low conversions)
- Lumping all your keywords all onto a single ad group when you should be segmenting them individually onto respective relevant ad groups.

ZERO testing:
- Simply just running your only ad copy without any alternative copy in testing which has a better conversion rate. No split / AB testing conducted.
- Which elements of the landing page are better enticing the prospects in converting ? (Call to action button, colours, hero image, form fields, copy content)

Generic Landing Page:
- Simply send all your potential customers to a generic page without a goal in mind; paying for all the clicks but zero conversions. When you should be sending them to respective product / promotions / information page.

Your Turn.
PPC search campaign learnings to share ?

Optimization #01: Call to action button

How are you testing and optimizing your web channel ?
Are you optimizing at a on-going effort ?
Or are you even testing and optimizing at all ?

Testing and optimizing your web channel or web site should never be a one-time process or effort, instead it should be a continuous process. Keep up the good work if you're testing and optimizing your web on an on-going effort. If you're don't know where or how to start, starting from this post and forthcoming posts, I'll be sharing some of my humble optimization hacks in helping you optimize your website.

Optimization #01: Call to action button

• What is the message on your call to action button ?

1. Are your visitors or audience even clicking it at all ?
2. Even if they are, do they ultimately convert into dollars and cents ?
3. How are you enticing your visitors towards the desired outcome ?

• What does the call to action button meant to them:

1. Why should we(visitors) click on it ?
2. What's IN for us(visitors) ?
   

How to optimize it ?
Instead of having those overused messages or words like "Click here", "Find out more", "Click here to read" or "Read more here".

• Build your call to action button that persuades them in taking action, which contains the "Why should we click on it" and the "What's IN for us" instead of those overused words which don't convert.

Related post:
. Optimization #02: Test ! Test ! Test !
. Optimization #03: Landing Page

Highly Recommend book on call to action:
. Call to action by Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg