Actually you might as well say they are not optimised at all. They just run on the ad space – and hopefully catch a sale or two. Not that the advertiser would ever know if they were driven by PPC or SEO or something else.
I can’t highlight enough how important it is to have a sufficient campaign management, tracking and measuring system in place – regardless if you sell something or simply want to drive awareness. You have to know what areas of your campaign and similarly your site works the best – deliver the best response rate.
When you know this, you can further enhance the campaigns, justify the amount of money you are putting towards your online campaigns and improve your site to the detail of improving a specific landing page.
Bid management, tracking and analytics tools are incredibly powerful tools in helping to make your PPC campaign a success.
You can’t do all this alone, manually – and I wouldn’t beat myself up about it.
The twists and turns that you have to factor in with the Google algorithm (to give you an example) in order to maximise your keywords and ad texts performance is just too complex and time consuming.
A little help from a software can’t hurt now can it.
Be sure to choose the right one though – the market is flooded with different offerings, various in pricing too – all claiming to be the best of them all. It’s sure got my head spinning!
I guess the best place to start would be the technology Google itself offers – and best yet – it’s totally FREE!
Google analytics and Google adwords have come a long way since the early days and have some fairly advanced options in terms of bid management, tracking and reporting options.
You can combine the two by measuring your campaigns, ad groups, keywords and ad texts performance on adwords – whereas Google analytics is more geared towards analysing website performance, specifically landing page performance and what happens once the user gets on the website.
My keyword is ‘research’.
Use a bit of time to research all the various softwares in the market to get the best out of your online campaigns. Some of the management systems can also be fairly pricey, therefore remember to calculate this into your decision.
After all – we’re all here to make money!
Posted by Terry 12th April 2012
Terry is Operations Director at Mahon Digital. From HR to credit control, web design to IT troubleshooting, you name it, he's done it.
