PPC Ads: What is search engine marketing best used for?

After our recent Web clinic, How to Increase Conversion in 2012: The last 20,000 hours of marketing research distilled into 60 minutes, we received this question from Veronica Cisneros, lead Web designer and developer at websonalized.com …

 

Question

1.            Assertion:

  • If I remember correctly, the ad excluded the product, or description of the product, and only made reference to awards received. The presenter indicated that the ad was only competing for clicks and position? Which I understood to mean that the vendor did not care to make a sell, but simply wanted traffic to website.

2.            Question:

  • Was my interpretation correct?
  • If not, what was meant by “competing for clicks and position”?
  • If yes, what did the vendor achieve by increasing the traffic to this landing page?

Answer

The point is that many people try to flat out sell with a PPC ad. The only thing the PPC ad should sell is the value of the customer clicking.

Once the customer clicks, then the landing page should sell the value of the next step (which may be lead capture, a sale, or some other objective, perhaps even just getting to the next stage in the funnel).

So for example, no one is going to buy business accounting software because of a PPC ad. However, you might be able to sell them on the value of clicking that ad to learn more. It is essential to understand where the buyer is in the process, and speak to the potential customer with value that resonates at that stage in the process.

So what is search engine marketing best used for? To communicate the value of a click to your landing page, not to get a sale.

You can hear Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, discuss our discoveries about search engine marketing and pay-per-click ads further in the free How to Increase Conversion in 2012: The last 20,000 hours of marketing research distilled into 60 minutes Web clinic replay.

 

Related Resources:

Optimizing PPC Ads: How to leverage the full potential of 130 characters by clarifying the value proposition

Converting PPC Traffic: How clarifying value generated 99.4% more conversions on a PPC landing page

Search Engine Marketing: Finding appeal for your PPC Ads

PPC Advertising: 5 winning display ad tactics that increased paying customers by 2,900% and dropped cost-per-lead 37%

The Small Business Website: Response Time to Internet Generated Leads – via websonalized.com

The post PPC Ads: What is search engine marketing best used for? appeared first on MarketingExperiments.

error

Enjoy this blog? Please spread the word :)

RSS
Follow by Email
fb-share-icon
LinkedIn
Share