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One of the most common pain points amongst those who run online communities is visibility. How do you make your community known and findable? Paid marketing can give new or established communities a much needed boost in exposure. Our friends at SiteWit know quite a lot about this area and provided us with a great four-part series on this subject.
If you are unsure about how to spend your time doing PPC management, you need to stop and ask yourself a few questions:
1. What am I trying to accomplish?
2. What am I doing that produces the most value?
3. What can I automate so I can increase sales?
PPC can be time well spent if done right
If you are spending your time trying to lower the cost of your PPC campaigns, you may be wasting time and money. Time should be spent trying to increase revenue, not lower costs. Think about it: If you spend $200 in labor trying to lower the cost of your PPC campaigns by $200, what did you really accomplish? More important, what did you not accomplish? Focus on tasks that produce revenue, regardless of whether they’re part of campaign management or not. Perhaps your time is better spent doing customer service or new client acquisition.
Evaluate how much time you spend doing each part of your campaign management and see what produces the most value. Where do you spend most of your time? Are your fiddling with your campaign keywords, writing better ad copy, A/B testing, or designing better landing pages? If you spend most of your time fiddling with your keywords, maybe you need to reevaluate your strategy. Although long tail keywords will lower your cost, you’re wasting time if all you’re doing is lots of research. Focusing on ad copy and landing page design will produce much better results for your time investment. Always have new ads in the rotation and always be testing two or more landing pages. Focus on doing things that increase engagement, conversion and revenue.
Let’s look at automation. What in the PPC management process can be automated for less than the cost of doing it manually? There are dozens of tools available to use for managing PPC campaigns or building and testing landing pages. Look at what you can do well, what you can do fast and what you can automate so you can spend your time more wisely.
SiteWit Analytics, Marketing and Enterprise Platforms gives users the tools to lower the time they spend doing PPC research, analysis, and optimization.
Our new SiteWit Engagement Index provides users a new way to optimize and report PPC success whether tracking conversions or not. We free up your time so you can focus on ad copy, A/B testing and landing pages. Learn more about how SiteWit measures, analyzes and optimizes using engagement to save you time and money.
This post originally appeared on the SiteWit blog and is part of a four article series on paid marketing for communities.
About SiteWit
SiteWit is a Do It Yourself (DIY) online marketing platform specifically designed for small and mid-sized businesses. With SiteWit you can get started with pay-per-click advertising through Google and Bing. Our solution fully automate SEM management and optimization to maximize budgets and drive new customers to your site.
