Saturday, February 28, 2009

Learn how to Succeed with PPC Marketing

By Sean Galusha

If you are in the market for PPC management, make sure you ask if they do split testing. If they do not offer it, or give some kind of excuse, run the other way.

The reason why is that without testing everything having to do with your campaign, you are destined for failure. Not only do you need to optimize your PPC text ads, but you also need to make sure your bid prices are being optimized.

Changing just one word in an ad can increase click through rates by more than 400%. Not only that but changing punctuation can have an even greater effect. Landing pages can be optimized too! Shifting parts of your site, changing colors, and changing images will all change the conversion rate of your website. You need to find what changes the conversion and click-through rates for the better.

To be successful, you have to test all the time. As soon as one test is done, you need to move on and test the same thing again.

One easy way to split test your text ads is to use what is called the chi-squared formula. What this formula tells us is at which point (how many clicks) a test is relevant, at which point we can declare a winner and move on to the next test.

We need to have enough information to make a decision that is at least 95% accurate.

If I were to play Tiger Woods in a game of golf, there is a possibility, albeight slight, that I could beat him once. However, if Tiger Woods and I were to play a game of golf everyday for 60 days, there is a virtually no chance that I could beat him more than 50% of the time over that timeframe. Playing just 1 game of golf is completely insignificant in the overall scheme of things.

This is the same concept we talk about in this article. You need to make sure that you have enough data to make educated decisions.

Believe it or not, it is hard to find PPC management companies that split-test like this for you. No matter what you do, make sure that you are always testing your campaign. Otherwise, you are pretty much doomed from the start. - 16651

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