What most advertisers do not see when using pay per click advertising to gain traffic is that social media can go hand-in-hand with PPC just like Infolinks can with Adsense. What puts most advertisers off implementing social media into PPC is that it takes time and effort without guaranteeing results (unlike PPC does). However, if I was to tell you that, free of charge, you can gain much more contextual traffic from PPC through social media, you might start to want to implement social media into your PPC campaign…

Firstly, let me tell you why you should introduce social media to PPC. The problem with PPC is that when advertisers gain the contextual traffic to your landing page, they usually have one objective they want the PPC traffic to fulfil: a conversion. If the web user does not perform an action that can be deemed a conversion, the effort and money the advertiser has exerted to get that web user to that landing page will have been wasted.  Therefore, you will want to stop this from happening: if the web user is going to simply click away, you will at least want something from him/her. This is where social media comes into place.

By placing implementing social media into PPC, you can give your PPC traffic the opportunity to share your landing page and campaign with other social media users helping to make your landing page spread across social media like a virus (potentially!). The reason this is likely to happen is because:

• The traffic to your landing page is targeted so that they are interested in the contents on your page.
• If they are interested in the contents on your page, they are more likely to share it socially.

The next question is, ‘where can I introduce social media into my PPC campaign?’. In essence, there is one main way.

Social Media Buttons On Landing Page

The easiest way to introduce social media to PPC is to place social media buttons onto your landing page to give PPC traffic the opportunity to click on them to share the page. Choosing the best social media plugin for your landing page will be the easy part due to the fact I created an article on this a few weeks ago. The difficult part of this is where to place the buttons. You do not want to locate your buttons in an area of your landing page which will affect its conversions. Therefore, try to place the buttons in an obscure area such as the corners of your landing page so that the traffic can easily see the buttons without distracting them from the content on the page.

As well as this, you can always try to link your whole campaign to social media in general  By this, I mean contests, competitions and viral social media objectives! For example, if Apple wanted to promote their iPad, they could create a PPC campaign stating that if you tweet with the hash tag #iPad, you could win an iPad. Linking back to social media buttons on the landing page, an example of this comes from Pepsi who I analysed a few months ago – look in the top right corner of their landing page and you will see they have introduced social media to PPC.