Refine your advertisements to attract more paying customers

In our last blog post, we talked about the various Keyword Targeting options that will help you gain access to prospects using web search on LookSmart's network of quality web sites.  We discussed how using Broad Match keywords can expand your exposure to potential customers and how Smart Match will help you reach a more specific audience.

In this blog post, we want to talk about a more generalized optimization strategy.  Optimization is another one of those marketing terms that really just means that you're approaching your marketing spend wisely through a process of evaluation and refinement.  When you optimize your advertising, you decide what your goals are and then modify your campaigns to better achieve those goals.

How to Optimize

Generally speaking, with text-based keyword advertising, your goal is to attract visitors to your web site that are interested in your products and services.  You can achieve this goal by employing these tactics:

• Revise your ad copy.  Is your ad sending the right message?  Are you attracting customers that actually make money for you?  Your ad copy is the "hook" that brings customers into your front door.  Eliminate wasteful and expensive clicks by making your message resonate with customers so that you attract those most likely to make you money.
• Revise your landing page.  The page that you send customers to when they click on your ad is called the "landing page" (your customers "land" there).  The landing page is really an extension of your ad.  Use it to help explain your product or service or to really sell your special offer or promotion.  Don't send customers to your home page -- customize a unique version of your home page that is designed specifically for visitors who clicked on your ad.
• Revise your targeting. How did people see your ad?  Imagine you are bidding on the word "filter".  Do you want customers looking for "oil filters"?  Internet filtering?  Water filtration systems?  Revise your keyword targeting to include those terms which are more specifically related to your business.  You can add as many keywords as you like to your campaign.
• Increase your bids. You're probably not the only company providing your product or service on the world wide web.  There are a limited number of positions that your ad can appear on.  To get a better position on those pages, you've got to make a competitive bid.   The more visible your ad is, the more likely your potential customers will see it.

In a future blog post, we'll talk more about specific strategies. In particular, we'll discuss a strategy that will let you optimize your ads to get more clicks (and therefore more potential customers) by actually paying less for each click.

Allen Hammock
Product Marketing Manager
allen.hammock@looksmart.net