I’ve spoken to a few prospective clients recently about their frustrations in getting decent PPC results. They aren’t looking to hit the ball out of the park, just improve their cost or speed of customer acquisition in many cases. Unfortunately there is no simple answer to their dilemma, since PPC results can vary from vertical to vertical even among the best marketers.

The toughest thing about dealing with clients and their PPC projects is sometimes knowing when to tell them it isn’t the best strategy for the way their website is built. I’ve seen plenty of beautiful websites that are terrible at converting customers. In this case I usually find that they let a designer create the website, with very little input from marketing, or marketing simply had no idea what the metrics look like for badly designed websites. In these cases I am forced to develop entire sub-sites to handle PPC traffic much more efficiently (and profitably.)

Another tough aspect, and usually the hardest nut to ultimately crack, is driving properly-targeted clicks to best value-proposition. This is tough because some clients do not always listen to what customers want to know, and their landing pages reflect this. The worst part about this scenario is that the agency is blamed, when the message should be, and that doesn’t solve the problem.

So the first thing to get better results: Structure your campaign around answering your customer’s questions. Research, research, research.

Second thing: Don’t rush to launch the campaign. I have a client right now who is insisting that the campaign should be live ina a day. Not if it’s done right. Most of mine take a week to put together and test.

Third thing: Test. Test. Test. And test some more. Keywords, negative keywords, ads, landing pages, copy, forms, titles, everything!

Fourth thing: Learn more about Quality Score. Improve that and your campaign will improve.

I realize I haven’t given you a tremendous amount of detail, well, because what works for a car dealer won’t work for a cosmetic surgeon and therefore, without experience, it can be tough to know when to do some things and when not to. The key though is to be open to testing things and trying to deliver to the customer exactly what they want (in seven seconds or less.) Provide a meaningful experience and you will succeed with PPC.

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