If you want to have success using pay per click to market your online goods and services, you’ve got to devise an effective pay per click formula. Not every online marketer approaches pay per click in the same way, and each probably has developed their own unique method in order to make pay per click (or “PPC”) work for them. Regardless of your approach, there are several important secrets to pay per click marketing that you should bear in mind when you decide to follow someone else’s plan or to develop your own pay per click formula. 

The biggest secret is that conversions (sales) are the most important aspect of your PPC marketing campaign. Everybody loves to get lots and lots of clicks on their PPC ads, but if those clicks aren’t converting into sales, then you’re simply wasting your time and money. That’s why it is critical to test your PPC ads, and full tracking and testing need to be the very foundation of any successful pay per click formula. 

So how do you test conversions? One of the simplest ways is to develop numerous PPC ads for each of your online promotions, rather than just one. A good mix might include three or four different ads, all for the same marketing effort. You could use those four different ads in bids on the same keywords, and then have each of those four ads point to a different page on your site. The content on each of the pages should be the same, even though the pages have a different URL. In this way, when developing your pay per click formula, you can decide which of these PPC ads generate the most sales. 

For example, if you have four different ads running and each ad sends 500 clicks to your site, you can use your Web tracking logs to determine which of those four ads ended up converting into the most sales. Say that “Ad #1” sent 500 clicks and from those you made 3 sales, and that “Ad #2” sent 500 clicks and from those you made 2 sales, and “Ad #3” sent 500 clicks and those generated 7 sales, while “Ad #4” logged 500 clicks but only one sale. Your conversion rates for those ads would be 0.6 percent, 0.4 percent, 1.4 percent, and 0.2 percent respectively. Clearly we can see that “Ad #4” out-performed all of your other ads combined. Therefore, when you put together your own pay per click formula, you should include the advertising ingredient that delivers the most return on investment: in this case, it would be “Ad #4”. Forget the others. 

Of course there are other things to consider in developing a successful pay per click formula, such as keyword research and the actual cost-per-click compared to revenue generated by the PPC traffic. But before you start with a wide shotgun approach to launching a PPC campaign, take a step back a moment and develop a plan to test your conversion rates. You’ll quickly find that this is one pay per click formula secret that can mean the difference between success and failure.