No matter how experienced you are with PPC, it still causes hiccups and snares with business models from time to time. Novices and mavericks alike have found PPC a puzzle of profit, trends, and tools just waiting for solving.
Case One: Everything is done “correctly,” however traffic conversions are dropping off and impressions are null.
Let’s take Martin, and his online music store. Martin built his company during the wake of the dot-com blow-out, when each major play failed. He experienced leverage through the power of an e-commerce back-end system constructed by himself. Even though his website is mildly dated, it is still simple to navigate. Martin still ran into the following issues:
Gated shopping cart: the user has to log-in to purchase. This results in user abandonment nearly 70% of the time, thus dropping his conversion rate. Martin fixed the problem by simply removing the cart.
STEP ONE: Remove Gates From Shopping Carts
There is no reason for having a gate on a shopping cart in this day in age. Martin chose to use a low maintenance method for his gate removal, thus keeping the ability to maintain the structure of his website intact. Users are able to continue passing through his site without using a sign-in screen, make a purchase, and his conversions are not hurt.
STEP TWO: Using Campaigns for Branded Terms
Now that Martin resolved the shopping cart problem as best as he could, he had to move on to the next one – competition on the pages of his site.
The first angle he took was creating a campaign utilizing all the keywords associated with his business’s brand. When doing this, his users are less likely to fall on to his competition’s website when they are performing a search.
Another tactic Martin can use it to claim all the local listings for his company, also, to ensure each eligible extension is applied and it is live. Even though this doesn’t exactly have anything to do with branded or bidding terms, this tactic does directly impact a company’s complete ownership of their page. Taking ownership of a local listing is simple, however it is a time consuming task because there is the requirement of sending in and making a response to a postcard.
STEP THREE: Device Targeting and Set Times
Because Martin’s traffic originates from desktops, but his campaigns target desktop and mobile equally, he had to set his mobile bidding to 0%. This prevented payment for extensions of phones and his campaign spend would not be directed to devices.
The next thing Martin targeted were ads running when his prospects were primarily searching products leading to his site. Since most young people listen to music after school or in the evening while doing homework, Martin decided to target from 5 p.m. to 12 a.m. EST Monday through Friday. He decided upon this time frame to allow for the site to obtain national leads, while still following his customer’s trends. This targeting helped him decrease any money wasted monthly, as well as allow him to see an increase in his lead targets.
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