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Whether it’s Facebook, Google or any of the other free services we use every day, ads are a part of our online lives. Some target us by our search habits, some don’t seem to be directed at us at all — and others are just plain annoying. The small pay-per-click (PPC) ads on the margins of social media and search results pages are so common that it’s easy to miss them.
But the good ones stand out.
They are relevant, they offer enticing deals and they’re not intrusive. Yet so many of them are loaded with subtle, yet catastrophic flaws that steer us away from the business that placed them and back to the vast expanse of the online void. One thing you don’t want an ad to do is frustrate the potential customers you’re trying to lure.
If there were a top 10 list of things that annoy customers about ads, bad landing pages would be number one. It is remarkable how many otherwise perfect ads lead to landing pages that make it all but impossible for potential customers to pull the trigger.
You’ve gotten them to notice your ad. You’ve enticed them with good language and copy. You’ve interested them enough to actually click, and when they finally do, they end up in a dead zone of a website that they can’t understand, doesn’t give them what they want or doesn’t look credible enough to trust.
Adogy’s recent article about ad campaign optimization was correct to include timing in their synopsis of what must be considered in ad placement.
Consider timing your PPC campaigns around holidays, seasons and other annual benchmarks. If you sell bathing suits, launch in April. If ice skates are your bread and butter, shove off in August. Are you a bar that gets a boost during baseball season? Your PPC campaign should kick off a month before spring training.
But don’t limit good timing only to giant chunks measured in months. If your business is geared to certain hours of the day, such as a restaurant or car wash — or if you notice a pattern of time-specific bumps in clicks — dump most of your dollars into ads that run during the right time of day.
Most major PPC campaign platforms — including Google AdWords — allow you to manipulate geographic location. You can get incredibly specific — down to a radius of just a few streets or blocks like in the case of, say, a pizza shop that delivers in a certain neighborhood. But even if it isn’t necessary for your campaign to go micro-local, geographic targeting by region, zip code, state or even country will boost results — unless, somehow, the world is your market.
Don’t neglect your landing pages. Landing pages are the gatekeeper between you and new customers. Customize your ads by place to make sure you don’t draw customers who want what you have, but are in the wrong geographic location for it to matter. Consider your timing — both time of day and time of year — and look for patterns in ads that work on schedules. Remember, you want to entice customers, not annoy them.
This post originally appeared on the award-winning Desk.com blog.
Owen is a tech writer and multimedia enthusiast based in Southern California who has spent several years writing for publications both in print and web format. He is based in Southern California, and is also versed in social media, video production, viral marketing, computer networking and cloud technologies.
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