Additions for your PPC Library

Posted by glenn on Dec 30, 2011 in Internet Marketing, Leadership, Off the Cuff, Product Reviews | 39 comments

Most experienced PPC professionals will tell you that a 3-4% lead generation from a PPC campaign is the norm. I’m going to tell you the same thing, however, there are times when I have made 10%, which amazed me, since before that moment I didn’t even believe that was possible.

I discovered and digested a few great books which have raised my personal average up to 5-7% on the PPC campaigns I create, and since I get paid by my success rate, that is a really good statistic to see increase (the clients find it fulfilling as well).

The first book I’ll hook you up with is called… Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions. I was once going to write a book on Landing Pages, but after reading this one, I realized that most of the ideas I would have put between the covers were addressed in this book.  Tim Ash breaches a few more esoteric areas than I would have gone into, but the main meat is a great book. Well worth the money, many people have told me.

The second book is Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive. This book deals with the way ads and landing pages should read, and why they should read that way. It is a book to get creative with, and probably the best book on the subject I have read since the Best Selling Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely (another fantastic book). These books deal with WHY we say YES to things… why we click, and why we don’t… which is equally important. If you are into any type of marketing or sales, these two are required reading.

The most effective tools I’ve used so far, whose ideas came straight from these pages are:

1. Reciprocity … find that moment to connect (chp 5-7  of Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive talk extensively about this idea)
2. Collect as little information from the user as possible, and collect the contact information last.
3. And, believe it or not, use Photoshop to enlarge the pupils of the eyes on the people in the design. I know it sounds weird, but it works. Holy cow it works (that’s one of the tactics that pushed me up to 15% on a campaign.)

You probably know this, but Google Analytics has an amazing A-Z testing machine, which rocks my world. Learn it, love it, use it, because the cash you save and the profits you glean are yours.