Pay per click advertising works best when every element within the campaign is at it’s maximum potential: one mistake in your campaign can cause your whole PPC campaign to under perform. It is therefore extremely important to know with great detail the type of people you are aiming your campaign at. Aiming your campaign at the wrong people (that are not interested in your campaign at all) will result in a low CTR on adverts and a low conversion rate. As a PPC advertiser, you will need perform market research in PPC in order to obtain maximum performance.

When looking to research a particular audience to advertise too, there are first two main types of research you can perform:

• Primary Research – This is research which you go out and retrieve yourself. It costs money and time. But, you do get research specifically related to your PPC campaign.
• Secondary Research – This is research which you obtain from another person. The research won’t be as specific to your campaign  However, it will give you an idea about your market and will save you alot of time and money compared to primary research.

Qualitative vs. Quantitative

Once you have chosen what primary or secondary research to research your target market, you can then look to use qualitative or quantitative research. Qualitative looks more at the opinion of the target audience while quantitative research looks for yes/no answers. From a PPC perspective, it is wise to use primary and secondary quantitative research to the market your PPC campaign is aiming at. Web users do not have the biggest attention spans which is a reason why many landing pages find themselves having high bounce rates (because they bore the web user too quickly). Short snappy questions by you or someone else is just the right questions you need to ask your market. For example, I asked two question back on AskWillOnline.com: the same question but worded quantitatively and qualitatively. The question was, ‘How long do you spend on the internet every day?’. As it turned out, the quantitative version of this question roughly gained an extra 30% votes than the qualitative.

What To Include In Market Research

When you perform your market research, you need to make sure there are at least the following four topics below you need to find out about your audience:

• Interests and hobbies.
• Their education.
• Gender.
• Age.

These are the four main elements of information you should know about your audience. From knowing this information, it will be easier than every to adapt your campaign and the type of landing page you use to gain the most conversions.

• You can implement their hobbies and interests into the landing page to keep them enticed onto the landing page. This will increase the chances of gaining a conversion.
• From finding out the type of education and skills your audience have, you can help make your landing page relate even further to their intellect.
• There will be differences between landing pages if the majority of your audience is one sex. You can move towards making your landing page continue gender constructions of men being masculine and women being feminine if that is what will gain you conversions.
• The age of your audience is important. If you know the age of you audience, you can determine exactly what they want from your landing page. For example, the younger generation will want something more exciting while maybe the older generation will appreciate something more practical.