Pay Per Sale Not Per Click

This article is about how to avoid wasted spending on your pay per click campaign. Pay per click marketing (ppc) using Google Adwords and the other less effective, but still worthy, offerings from Yahoo and Microsoft, works well for many businesses.

To understand the principle of PPC let’s take an example of someone searching for “Cashmere sweaters for men” in Google. If I type this in now a small rectangular box with “Sponsored Links” in the corner of the box appears above the organic results (non-paid). In the box are three Cashmere Sweater options:

Further ads appear on the right hand side of the page. All ads are clickable so the searcher has to choose which one – in a similar way to wandering down a High Street and deciding which shop to walk into. The top spot belonging to Uniqlo will cost more to buy a click than those below.

Now a lot of marketers, both amateur and professional believe that getting you to click is the most important thing - after all using the “in it to Win it” philosophy if you don’t click you can’t buy.

It is true that without entering the shop a purchase can’t be made but it doesn’t follow that having entered (especially online) you will buy. The road to online business failure is littered with those who didn’t think about whether a click will result in a sale.

It’s hopefully obvious to anyone that once I click I must see cashmere sweaters presented well and at the right price or I’m gone. What isn’t obvious is whether my keyword phrase works at turning a click into a sale. The only way to check this is to make sure there is conversion tracking code on every confirmation of order page or on your enquiry form thank you page. What this code does is to report the visit to the page  to Google Adwords to allow you to see which keyword phrase results in a sale.

An experienced PPC consultant can probably have an educated guess at which keywords are likely to work but the reality is no-one really knows until you check. For instance employing the keyword phrase Men’s  Cashmere Sweater might get you hundreds of clicks but no buys.

Google Adwords allows you to value the conversion. You can do this based on the sale price of an item or service. This is massively useful in terms of making sure you dump keywords that the cost per conversion is too high and focussing on the ones that deliver the goods.