Know when your Pay-Per-Click campaign isn't working, and break out of it. Now where do you go from there to keep traffic to your site?

San Diego, CA (YoureCommerce.com) June 23, 2008 -- If you've noticed your leads from pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns slow to a trickle (or worse, no leads at all), then it may be time to see if you're just wasting your money on an advertising method that isn't right for your business anymore.

The first thing to do is check your Bounce Rate. Hopefully you have Google Analytics installed on your website. If not, get it! It's a free, impartial tool that lets you monitor your web advertising performance. If you don't have Google Analytics and you can't check your bouce rate, skip this paragraph. Your "Bounce Rate" is the percentage of visitors who leave your website immediately after they see it. This is definitely not good, and you want your bounce rate to be as low as possible (20-25% is good in my opinion). When using Google Analytics to check your bounce rate, make sure to filter down to only traffic from the PPC company you want to analyze, otherwise, you'll get an overall bounce rate from all traffic sources that may not be accurate of your PPC company's indivdual performance. Now if you are reading this article, I bet your bounce rate is in the 40% range or higher (so almost half of the traffic you are paying for immediately leave your site). I've seen some of my customers who have had bounce rates of 68%. I told them they might as well burn their money.

Now if you call your PPC company and ask them why your phone isn't ringing, they most likely will add a bunch of extra keywords and ad variations to your account, and even suggest you raise your Bid per keyword. DON'T do this! It is almost never the solution, and it will only let your PPC company drain more money out of your pockets. This is exactly what I was told when I called my account exec about my deteriorating PPC performance.

Never entirely trust your PPC company sales people to suggest keywords or ad titles for you. They don't know your company as well as you do. They just pick the keywords that get the most clicks so they make more money (This happened to one of my clients for a month, and he was using a major PPC firm). It is up to you to make sure the keywords and ads used are relevant to your business. The best way is to pick up phrases from your website and put it in your ad. I personally think your ad title should be your business name. That way even if people don't click on the ad, they see your business name.

Now, your ad is relevant, but your bounce rate is still high. This is the sign of your PPC company bringing poor quality traffic to your site. Time to cut your losses and try something else. That's what I'm doing. For the past 8 months, I've been with this PPC company. They were very good the first three months. I got bounce rates of 21%, and leads came in every day. Then gradually, the bounce rate increased to about 45% this June (and I did not modify my website at all), and the leads stopped coming. Tomorrow, I'm calling my account exec to pause my ad campaign so I can spend my money elsewhere. My point is, you have to know when PPC isn't working so you can get out on time. I've had too many clients who got bamboozled by PPC sales people trying to get them to spend more money on a service that doesn't deliver. "You need to increase your bid... You need to add this keyword... You need more ads..." No! You can know for yourself if it's not working. If your ad is relevant to your website, and you aren't getting customers, don't hesitate to call them and cancel.

What next? I'm trying press releases now. I've looked at a few firms, namely PRweb.com. I think I'm going to try their "SEO Visibility" Package for $200, and see where that takes my company. I'll post another article in the coming weeks to update you on how that works.

 

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I'm Quan Nguyen, and I started YourEcommerce.com my senior year in high school (that was 2005). I graduated Salutatorian (that's rank no. 2) in my class. Currnently, I'm an Electrical & Computer Engineering major at UC San Diego (www.ucsd.edu) in my third year.

If you have any interesting stories to tell, or want me to post, feel free to email me at sales [at] quantecsoftware[ dot ] com

Company Website: http://yourecommerce.com