Pay Per Click, just like in life, you need just to know a few things to get it right. However, you need to know those few things very well. As pointed out last week you may be able to avoid the worst mistakes of running a PPC campaign but you may still come up unprofitable.

Pay per Click costs you money. If that money is not bringing in more money, then you can as well stand on a cliff and throw your money away. Good business requires you to know exactly where your money is going and how much it is bringing back. It’s in this knowing that lays the secret of PPC success.

You could do everything else right, but the failure to run tests to keep you in the know could keep you from ever making a profit. The secret to PPC is to test, track, then test again. You fundamentally test and track at three levels.

The first test is at the conversion level. There is probably no faster way to lose money then to send bought traffic to a poorly converting sales page. Before you look at any other metric in your PPC campaign always watch your CR (Conversion Rate) like a hawk. Most of the profit is made or lost here. Anything less than a healthy CR is akin to a leaking bucket. You collect water to the brim, but by the time you get to the house your bucket is empty.

Tracking and testing a sales page can be a specialized task. It aims to know what elements on your page lead to conversion. Most significant of these are usually the headlines and the sub-headlines. But together with this you need to test the full copy. Consider the tone of language, the layout, the images or lack of them, testimonials that show others are happily using the same product, guarantees and similar credibility factors that reduce friction in the sales process etc.

The second level of PPC sales process that need testing is the advertisement copy. This entails keeping tab of your CTR (Click Through Rate). Remember that CTR is the number of times you advert gets clicked for each 100 impressions. The advantage of keeping this figure as high as possible is because it has a very interesting effect particularly in Google’s AdWords. If an advert has a high CTR in AdWords, Google tends to reduce the amount you pay per click below you bidding price. This reduces you cost of advertising. But even more intriguing is that as they reduce you cost per click they also bump up your position in the bid. This means as you advert does better you not only pay less you also go higher up the display say from position 6 to 3. A CR that is struggling or just breaking even can be rescued by a high CR.

Finally you also need to test you and track you keyword list. There are keywords that make you money and there are those that do not. You job is to separate them, and only retain the money keywords.

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