Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [235]
Customized Landing Pages
The next comparative aspect of PPC and SEO is the “landing page,” the page that the prospect sees after the click. SEO practitioners have to work to make sure the most ideal and relevant page holds the ranking for a term, because sometimes a page ranks differently than what was intended. SEO can affect this process. PPC advertisers can designate a specific page as the “landing page” for the advertisement and create landing pages for specific ads, ad campaigns, and ad groups. This also allows for the ability to tightly control the campaign and quickly test different designs of landing pages.
Although SEO practitioners can test different versions of landing pages, PPC practitioners can test radically different messages, page designs, and calls to action without worrying about losing rankings. Because the visitors are coming directly through the ad, rankings do not have to be part of the conversion factors when testing PPC landing pages, which eliminates a large variable.
Quick Results and Analysis
SEO practitioners who affect results have to plan campaigns and then measure them for effectiveness when a critical mass of visitors has developed. Usually that happens about two to three months after the optimization campaign, if it is based on a specific search trend. The measurement of SEO efforts is not usually in real time (when the campaign implements). The measurement of PPC can happen very quickly, and all aspects of the campaign can be changed and tweaked as necessary to improve response rates and click-throughs.
Advertisers can see immediate results the same day that a campaign goes live and can test messages, keywords, landing pages, and positioning of the advertisement. The real-time measurement allows for these types of changes during the campaign because all aspects of the process are tracked and reported through the PPC management interface and analytics.
Smart advertisers spend a significant amount of time in the first few days or weeks of a campaign to ensure that the right message is being displayed to the right people at the right time. A well-managed campaign can consistently find ways to reduce ad spend while increasing results. This allows for immediate measurement of profitability, which provides significant allowances and advantages for PPC campaigns.
Placement
PPC campaigns allow advertisers to define placement. If you want your ad to show up in the most prominent space, then you can pay more than all of the other advertisers to gain that visibility. If you want high visibility, it is completely within your power to bid on high placement positions and increase the budget accordingly to maintain that placement. If it is hard to gain rankings for a particular word or groups of words, then PPC can nicely cover the real estate of the search results page until the organic results are able to get more visibility.
Advertisers can also scale back and do more strategic placement of advertising, such as focusing on the sponsored results on right side of the page rather than the top of the page. Instead of bidding high for the top placement, advertisers can test other ad positions that do not cost as much to see which provides better results according to the goal of the campaign.
Budget
PPC is one of the only ways to ensure that you stay within a budget for a search marketing campaign. The search engines all allow for the advertiser to place daily limits on the campaign spend, which allows advertisers to stay on budget and not overspend on a campaign. Of course, this can be made much more effective by properly managing a campaign and optimizing the budget through testing and measuring the results.
The budget is affected by multiple factors,