Many thanks to all the businesses who attended my spring seminar on “How to Increase Website Sales” mid-April in Matlock. It was good to see both some familiar and some new faces attending the event. Everyone was busy scribbling down notes and ideas to implement on their online shops! So I hope to see great things from their websites over the next twelve months.

Watch this space for the next planned free seminar to help your online business grow.

Many small businesses try out Google’s adwords PPC (Pay Per Click) online marketing. Often they have received a free voucher through the post encouraging you to signup and try it out. It is in fact extremely easy to setup and run a Google adwords campaign – in around 30 minutes you can bring more customers to your website.

However, without some basic guidelines on how to setup, manage and optimise your adwords account, many small businesses find themselves with a large bill from Google at the end of the month and very few additional sales or leads.

Unfortunately this puts many small businesses off using Google adwords in future which is a shame as a correctly managed and optimised campaign can produce great results. Below are a five simple tips to help small businesses  avoid some of the biggest mistakes when setting up a PPC campaign:

1.  Content Network VS Google Search

Google Search = ads displayed on the standard Google search engine in the sponsored ad section.

Content Network = Google showing your advert on any website across the internet

Initially run your campaign only on the Google Search network excluding “Search Partners”. Once you have a viable campaign running here, then look to create a separate one for the content network. Never mix the two in one campaign to control your costs.

2. Split Campaigns Into Multiple Ad Groups

Within each campaign setup multiple ad groups, each one containing very similar groups of keywords. You can then match the adverts more closely to the keywords.

3. Don’t Send All Adverts to Your Home Page

Always send visitors to the MOST RELEVANT webpage for the advert. This is another reason for implementing (2) above as it allows you to send visitors to the best matched website page for the keyword phrase they input to Google.

4. Always Check Your Keyword Quality Score.

Google adwords keyword quality score needs to be at least 7 or above to ensure you are not being over-charged for clicks on your adverts. Anything below 6 and your keywords and not matching up with the webpage you are sending visitors to and the campaign is unlikely to be profitable.

5. Make Effective Use of Negative Keywords

Always research and setup negative keywords on campaigns and ad groups. This ensures that you are not paying for irrevelant clicks for your campaigns.  A great example of this is the company bidding on the keyword “night stands” which was not working out at all profitable. When they investigated the actual keyword phrases people were finding their advert and clicking on it for, they discovered around 50% of the traffic came from the keyword phrase “one night stand”……..!  They setup “one” as a negative keyword and the campaign immediately became profitable.

Bonus TIP

Finally, I think the most important thing to understand about PPC advertising is that you must be prepared to continuously montior, tune and optimise the whole E2E sales funnel. So long as you have the time and inclination to work on these areas then PPC can be an extremely profitable advertising medium for your business.

I recently finished a successful Google Adwords PPC trial for a customer in a very small niche market place. Below is an overview of how I turned an initially unprofitable PPC campaign into a proftable, productive one in a few months.

The diagram below shows the number of times adverts were shown on Google (impressions in BLUE) and the number of times visitors clicked on the adverts to visit the website (in GREEN).

Initially you can see a huge volume of impressions compared to the number of clicks received. By optimising and tuning the keyword list and the advert content, I reduced the list of keywords down to the most profitable ones.

Once the most profitable keywords and adverts had been identified, then the PPC website landing pages were analysed, tuned and optimised. Scientific tests were completed to identify the web page format and layouts which produced the most sales.

Below is an extract from the Google Adwords PPC account for just one set of keywords from this campaign.

You’ll note from the above image how the clicks and click through rate (CTR) have increased month on month AND the cost per click (CPC) has nearly halved in the same time.

Clicks on Advert      -  Increased 1000%   (2 -> 20)
Click Through Rate – Increased 400%       (1.53% -> 8%)
Cost per Click            – Reduced 40%             (38p – 22p)

Throughout the position of the advert has been maintained at second place on the first page of Google.

Initially the monthly cost of the Adwords Campaign was 25% of the sales value which was not profitable. By the end of month two the Adwords cost had been reduced to 10% of the sales value and is now producing profitable sales for my customer!

Contact me and find out how I can make your adwords campaigns profitable.

Sometimes it’s the simplest changes to websites which can have the biggest impact.  One of my customers launched a christmas gift voucher campaign with a roadside banner next to their premises. To support this campaign I setup a large, prominent banner clearly sign-posting where to find the gift vouchers online.

Just adding the above banner to the top of the home page increased visits to the gift voucher webpage by 300%!

The original website link to the gift voucher webpage looked like this – it’s the brown diamond top right hand side of the website…..

Not only did gift voucher webpage views increase significantly but so did gift voucher sales.

So checkout your home page for “Road Blocks”.

• Are you providing clear sign-posts to your website visitors?
• Are you effectively promoting your business products & services?
• Do you “tell” your customers where to go next on your website?

If not, have a go. Setup Google Analytics on your website, monitor your sales or orther goals. Then try a simple test and measure the impact on your website conversions and sales.

Analysing, testing and measuring conversions on websites is called “Conversion Rate Optimisation” or CRO which is not commonly practised on websites. Find out more about Conversion Rate Optimisation or see how Conversion Rate Optimisation could double your website sales.

Tags: conversion rate optimisation, cro, Google Analytics, website

If you’re at all interested in setting up a blog, Facebook page or Twitter account then checkout John Hayden’s “31 Day Challenge: Optimise Your Blog with Social Media”

Even if you’re just interested in Twitter or Facebook and don’t have a blog check this one out. It has great suggestions for setting up your Facebook page.