Many Internet marketers eventually use pay-per-click (PPC) advertising as part of their overall marketing strategy. Much of the time these advertisers hope that the increase in revenue will be at least enough to cover the advertising and, perhaps, even bring in additional profit. Some other businesses use these advertising campaigns with the primary objective of building their list of leads so that they may gradually build a relationship with the prospects that will eventually create some of them into customers. Still other times, the focus of some Internet marketers during a PPC campaign includes using the data that they collect for research and planning purposes.
I am writing this article to draw your attention to using pay-per-click as a research tool, although you should feel free to make a profit at the same time (Of course this assumes that you already know how to conduct thorough keyword research prior to launching your advertising campaigns.
* Tracking software, such as the free Google Analytics and may commercial packages, will provide you with the exact key phrase used by all of your visitors to get to your PPC landing pages. Obviously, if you set up your campaign properly, you know which of the phrases that you bid on are bringing the visitors, however, unless you are using only exact match phrases, that does not alert you to the precise search terms entered by your traffic. As a simple, if lengthy, example, let’s say that you bid on a broad match phrase such as, “lamp green buy.” (Of course, you would have the quotation marks around those words, if it is a broad match.) You could have individual visitors who searched for “buy expensive tiffany lamp,” “buy a used green lamp in Atlanta or Marietta,” buy a green or yellow ceramic lamp” and other phrases. Any traffic you receive would be looking to buy some sort of green lamp. You probably do not sell all of those that your visitors want. You may want to create pages for the key phrases that are applicable (and which seem to be giving you enough traffic to justify the relatively minimal effort). If you then optimize those pages for those phrases, you can eventually get organic traffic for those searches. That can help justify your PPC expense for years to come.
* Test your headings (headlines) on your PPC landing pages. Set up two pages for the same ad group. The pages should be identical in every other way except for the heading. It’s possible to set up some content management systems to do this or buy inexpensive software to alternate the pages for you. It’s also very easy to simply change the landing page to the different version within your ad after you have received a sufficient number of clicks to provide your with useful data—at least 100 clicks. Compare the conversion results from the two versions. If there is a clear winner, keep it in the rotation and set up another test with a different alteration in the heading.
* Conduct the same format test as with headlines, but test a different variable. For example, you may want to test two different product images against each other. Alternatively, you might want to test the impact of landing pages which have two different videos of product demonstrations.
Make sure that on each of the content related tests you are only changing one variable. If you alter both the image and the headline at the same time, for example, you will have difficulty determining which variable is responsible for any changes in the results or what the relative impact of each is compared to the other. Of course, if you have experience with multi-variant analysis, you may choose to alter more than one variable at any given time. Most people, however, do not have that level of statistical sophistication.,
The major point to go away from this article is that you should be using your PPC campaigns to do considerably more than bring visitors to your site and hope that they will purchase from you. Get as much out of the funds that you are spending as possible. Gather data, analyze it, and act decisively based upon your findings!




