We all know that Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, or paid search, is used to generate traffic to a website in effort to increase sales. All things being equal, ads increase traffic and traffic improves customer acquisition. Pretty simple.

What’s not so simple, however, are the ways in which you can leverage that investment in paid search advertising to generate additional, derivative value above and beyond your PPC campaigns. And this additional value can be instrumental to the growth and success of a business.

Here are 9 ways to realize additional value for your business from your PPC advertising investment:

1. Use popular PPC keywords as a way to enhance your search engine optimization (SEO) effort by incorporating those keywords into the content of your site.
2. Design other online and offline marketing campaigns, such as email campaigns, catalogs and direct mail pieces, centered on the most popular items being searched for and bought through paid search.
3. Evaluate your most successful PPC keywords to determine which landing pages should be optimized on your Website. We suggest focusing on your best performing keywords and landing pages versus spending your time trying to make the bad keywords and landing pages better. Something that’s bad may never be fixed, but something that is good has a much better opportunity to become even better.
4. Track sales and profit from your paid search campaigns by day and time of day to help with anything from how you staff your office, to when you offer certain promotions, or when you run your advertising and how you set your bids.
5. Use tools to compare what your customers search for versus what they actually buy to determine unique marketing opportunities. A recent study by a leading Internet analytics firm found that 44% of online purchases that result from pay-per-click advertising are for products that are completely unrelated to the ad that was clicked on. With knowledge of these direct and indirect search-versus-buy relationships, you could, for example, send a custom email offer to a customer for the product they searched for, but did not buy. You know they were comfortable buying from you, but for some reason chose to not buy the product they initially searched. Make the offer for the product they searched for and see if your conversion rate and profitability from email marketing climb.
6. Focus your energy on your best performing products and keywords. Many advertisers focus on trying to make every single keyword and every single product perform well. More experienced advertisers focus their energy on just their best performing products and are therefore able to produce more profit with less effort. This tighter focus on where you spend your time advertising tells you which vendors you should spend more time with and which products you make sure you have in stock and are able to ship due to popularity.
7. Don’t forget about impressions. Impressions are a forgotten metric. People have moved beyond looking at how many times their ad has appeared because at the end of the day, sales, and more importantly profit, are what matter. Impressions do, however, provide a general indicator of consumer interest. Smart business owners have their pulse on what people are looking for and impressions are a good metric to determine this. If you see impressions rise, there is an opportunity to profit. If you see impressions fall, it may be time to pull out.
8. Use PPC ads to draw more attention to your organic listings. Many advertisers wonder if they should advertise on terms if they also rank high in the organic listings for that term. The answer is YES for two main reasons. The first is that having an ad and an organic listing on the same page is the equivalent of having a bigger ad in a newspaper or magazine. The more space you occupy on a page, the more eyeballs you draw to your ad(s). Second, when people have a choice of clicking on an ad or an organic listing, they’ll most likely choose the free listing, so you don’t have to pay for a click.
9. Use paid search as a way to test new product. If your site has thousands of products, no one will know you have this new product unless they find it by navigating through your site. Through pay-per-click advertising, it can be found easier by consumers. You can quickly tell if a new product will sink or swim by driving traffic to it and measuring the conversions. When compared to other products on your site, you can quickly and inexpensively determine if this product is worth marketing or carrying at all.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 4th, 2007 at 1:49 pm and is filed under All Blogs, PPC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.