This morning has been a good one for link baitable story titles — Problogger has the astonishingly good “How to Write Posts That Set StumbleUpon on Fire” and the bent logic of “How to write terrible meta tags” brought me to the UK’s Leapfrogg Blog. FYI, the article had some fine advice but very little about writing terrible meta tags.
I did keep browsing around to an article I found totally delightful — Save Money, Increase Sales, Eat Waffles! This one is a case study of PPC landing page and ad copy relevancy based on the top results for an innocent query, “buy waffle iron.” The author makes clear in wry, illuminating prose how important good landing pages and well-matched ad copy are to effective paid search ads. A point that should be taken to heart since out of ten ads displayed for the search, only 4 had anything to do with waffle irons.
It still boggles my mind that so much money is poured into PPC by advertisers that don’t seem to grasp the fundamental truth of paid search: success is defined by specificity. This means a tight relationship between the keywords, ad copy, and landing pages. A handful of refined phrases and target pages that convert well is far better than a vague campaign that gets poor CTR, or even worse, poor CTR AND poor conversion.
While it’s deceptively easy to start a pay per click campaign, recognize that it is an art that is difficult to master. Avoid money pits by honing in on targeted keywords, start with reasonable ad budgets until you can get the basic mechanics of your campaign working, and then expand slowly when you can justify cost with strong conversion. And never stop critiquing your own work!
