by Kaci Bower, Senior Research Analyst

Marketing Research Chart: Three-dimensional view of PPC tactics by usage, effectiveness and difficulty

This is a blended chart comprised of answers from these three underlying questions:

Q. Which of the following PPC tactics has your organization used?

Q. Please indicate the degree of difficulty (time, effort and expense required) for each of the PPC tactics used by your organization.

Q. Please indicate the level of effectiveness (in terms of achieving objectives) for each of the PPC tactics used by your organization.




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Eighty-two percent of marketers are creating highly targeted ad groups. Specificity is a key to improving quality scores, so it is expected that companies would report strong usage with this PPC tactic.

This high degree of execution comes despite 63% of marketers stating that dividing keywords into small, highly relevant ad groups requires fair to significant amounts of time, effort or expense.

In close relation to this tactic, 74% are writing relevant ad copy for each ad group, despite 67% finding this tactic somewhat or very difficult.

Organizations do embrace testing as a key component of PPC, although usage levels tend to be lower. More marketers perform split tests on their ad copy than split tests on their landing pages.

Just 33% of organizations employ split testing landing pages as a tactic, despite nearly 50% reporting this as very effective in achieving marketing objectives. This tactic was viewed as the most difficult, with 31% finding it very difficult and an additional 41% finding it somewhat difficult.

With higher levels of effectiveness but lower usage, experimenting with matching options poses an opportunity for marketers. Only 22% of organizations currently try this, yet twice that amount deems this to be a very effective tactic.

For additional research data and insights about PPC, download and read the free Executive Summary from MarketingSherpa’s 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report – PPC Edition.


Useful links related to this chart

PPC Advertising: 5 winning display ad tactics that increased paying customers by 2,900% and dropped cost-per-lead 37%

Custom Landing Pages for PPC: 4 Steps to 88% More Leads, Lower Costs

PPC Marketing: A look at analytic and monitoring tools