Use this Sneaky Little Trick to Boost Your Pay per Click Results
I’ve written before how I find Google to be the most interesting business on the planet. I say this not because they’re mad geniuses that are slowly taking over the world but because they have a business model that defies description.
As you likely know, Google has something called Google Adwords. You can pay Google to have you ads appear when someone does a search on the specific search term you wish to bid on. Without a doubt it is the fastest and best way to get laser targetted traffic to your websites.
But here is the thing about Google. They don’t REALLY publish their rules anywhere where they can be easily found. Instead, they say, “Open an account with us, tell us which search terms (or keywords) that you want to bid on and then we’ll get back to you with a price.”
Because Google is quickly becoming the only game in town (Yahoo and MSN are not dead yet but definitely mosying out to pasture) they can afford to do this and people continue to shell out way more than they have to because they don’t know the rules.
That was a long preamble but it was necessary to make this point. If you dig deeply enough through Google’s site you will actually find what they’re looking for and what they base their nebulous ‘Quality Score’ on. The higher your quality score the better your placement and the lower you price per click.
Through an awful lot of testing I’ve found out that Google wants to see consistency. They want the search term that you’re bidding on to appear in your ad and on your landing page (where you send the visitor when they click your ad). So, schematically, the campaign that should get you the highest quality score (using “Internet Marketing Videos” as our search term) would look like this:
The visitor would type in “Internet Marketing videos” on Google and your Adwords ad would appear containing the words internet marketing videos somewhere in it. When a visitor clicks on your ad he or she would be taken to a page that has again, the words “internet marketing videos” in it.
You’re a sharp cookie and you may be thinking, “But if I am bidding on 1,000 keywords do I need 1,000 landing pages to match those keywords?” In theory, yes – if you want the highest quality score and the lower price per click.
In reality, you can use the sneaky little trick that all of this has been building up to – Dynamic Landing pages. You can ad a script on your landing page that pulls the keyword phrase that you’re bidding on from your Google campaign and displays it on your landing page.
So instead of building dozens or hundreds of different landing pages, you can build one dynamic landing page and include this script anywhere that you would like your keyword phrase to appear on the page:
<?php echo $_GET['{keyword}']; ?>
I’m not a programmer but even I can make this work in a few minutes. The trick is that your landing page must be in php or it won’t work.
Give it a try. When everything you do is consistent (which is what Google says they want) your quality score should shoot through the roof and your price per click should come down.
There are other PPC tricks that you can also leverage but they will have to wait for another time. Stay tuned…
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