Basic PPC Campaign Tips for the Novice

6 Basic PPC Campaign Tips for the Novice - Starting with the basics.

Starting a successful PPC campaign is never easy. If you’ve wanted to start a PPC campaign for your business then you have probably done enough reading to make your librarian proud. Still, you don’t really know where to begin.

It takes proper planning from the word go and requires a strategy that will not only make it successful but also profitable.

What’s critical is that you don’t want your time and effort to go to waste and most important, you don’t want to throw away money at marketing without seeing success.

It all boils down to the basics of PPC and knowing what the essential requirements are. Whether you want to do some brand building, promote a specific campaign or event, or are trying to sell products via your website, there are basic essentials that should be done no matter what your strategy is.

Here are a few basic tips to get you started. (for the sake of this article let’s assume that you are targeting Google users and that you are thinking of doing PPC via Google Adwords)

Demographics and Target Audience
The first thing you need to do is to make sure you are going to target the right audience and you need to know where these people are. It obviously depends on what you are ultimately selling, albeit a product, service or just branding for your company. You can target males or females of a specific age group as well as target specific locations (countries / regions / provinces / cities). These options can be selected for each of your campaigns via your Adwords account and it is fairly easy to do.

What is important to know at this stage is simply the country or region, including the sub regions, provinces or towns you want to target. For example, you may be based in South Africa but want to target users in Namibia for instance. Then you need to target your advertising to a Namibian market via www.google.com.na and do your research based on this demographical area. If you’re a South African company but only sell products in Gauteng, then you will target www.google.co.za but only choose to show your ads to Google users in the Gauteng province.

As an advertiser you also have the option of enabling your ads to show on Google's partner networks. The "search network" is the Google search engine and partnered search engines showing AdWords ads in response to user searches. The "Google Display Network" (formerly referred to as the "content network") shows AdWords ads on sites that are not search engines. These content network sites are those that use AdSense and DoubleClick, the other side of the Google advertising model.

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Keyword Research
Keywords are the basis of a Paid Search campaign and the more targeted and specific your keyword selections are, the more profitable your campaign will be. If you want to do a brand building campaign you need to understand the company, brand/product and how potential customers will interact with this brand or product.

To start, use the Google Keyword Tool which is available in your Google Adwords account, or use the external keyword tool. This is where you first need to select the location and language you want to target. For additional insights you can also use the Google Search Based Keyword Tool and Google Insights for Search.

Before you start entering in keywords or phrases into the boxes it is best to keep in mind that you should always try and group your keywords into silos or categories (verticals).

For example, if you sell ‘towels’ you should separate your list of keywords into verticals that makes sense.

bath towels	beach towels	hand towels
luxury bath towels cheap bath towels white bath towels pink bath towels	kids beach towels cotton beach towels wholesale beach towels promotional beach towels	paper hand towels bathroom hand towels disposable hand towels hand towel dispenser

There will be so many different variations for ‘towels’ which will make it impossible to manage if all of these keywords are just bunched together, so rather group them into a structure that not only makes sense, but is easy to manage. This helps when you also need to write text ads or create landing pages but more about that later on.

Remember also that you should try and be specific with longer phrases rather than just using general terms such as ‘towels’, ‘bath towels’, ‘beach towels’, etc. This is a good starting point but you’ll soon discover that people search by using 3 or 4 word phrases.

Finally, keyword match types have a huge impact on the performance of your campaigns. Having your keywords in broad match type only will bring you the most traffic, but only result in high cost per conversion. Start with Broad Match or the new Broad Match Modifier type, then when your campaign has gather enough data starting to identify the Phrase Match and Exact Match keywords that are bringing in a higher Click-Through Rate. Also make use of negative keywords to filter out unwanted search matches.

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Account Structure
Setting up a best fit structure for your campaign is very essential especially if you have numerous keywords that you wish to target. This will not only help you maintain your campaign better but also assist in better optimization of keywords and text ads and will make allocating landing pages to specific keywords much easier. The goal of having a structure to your PPC Campaign/s is so that you can find things easily and manage keywords, ads and budgets effortlessly. A better structure equals better performance.

Similar to the groups or silos explained above (keyword research), structure your account into campaigns and ad groups that make sense according to the product or service you are selling. This will make it easier to expand your keyword lists according to a specific silo or to exclude unwanted traffic.

A well-organized account allows for effective and efficient management of your entire campaign, freeing up resources that would otherwise be bogged down in the on-going maintenance of the account.

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Account Structure Set Up and Best Practices

Quality Scores
The AdWords system calculates a 'Quality Score' for each of your keywords. It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user's search query.

The higher your quality score, the better your chances of being promoted to the top ad position without having to increase your maximum CPC.

To ensure that your ads appear in the top positions in the search engine results you need to increase the quality of your ad group by improving your clickthrough rate (CTR) for keywords, your display URL’s and each ad group. You also need to improve the quality of your landing page and the relevance of your keywords to the ads and the landing page.

“Quality scores for PPC campaigns are calculated based on the specificity of the keywords in your ad group. Your quality score is also based on the consistency of your keywords between your ad title, your keyword groups and your landing page.

For example, if your ad group is for “bath towels”, make sure you are using the specific keywords from your ad group on your landing page as well as in your Ad title and description lines.

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Text Ads & Ad Testing

Writing text ads depends on what you want to achieve. You need to write Text Ads that sell your product, brand or service and thereby attract anyone who wants to buy what you have on offer. If you’re doing a brand campaign you may simply want to provide meaningful information about your Brand, but you don’t want to be boring either, so the best is to always write ads that are intriguing and offer the user a reason to click.

The most important tip is to write multiple ads and to continue testing different variations for each of your ad groups. Never write an ad and forget about it. Always test your variations and continue to build on the strongest ads that bring the highest CTR’s.

The second most important tip is to remember that your Ads are the shopping window of your business. When a user clicks it means that they are already interested in what they saw in your ad and therefore you ad must sell exactly what is displayed on the destination URL or landing page. There is nothing more frustrating than clicking on an Ad that is selling me ‘blue beach towels’ and I end up on your homepage.

There are so many good articles on writing effective Ads, so I’ve included a handful of them below, but be sure to also read the Google Text Ad Guidelines and Policies. This is very helpful when writing ads for the first time.

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Landing Page Optimization
Optimizing your landing pages should never be ignored, it is an important step to make sure that users who have clicked are being turned from interested customers to paying customers.

The first step is to correctly manage expectations. As mentioned earlier, your ad is the first view users have of your product or service, so do not disappoint them when they click on your Ad. They are expecting exactly what you told them in your Ad and therefor you need to provide a page of content that contains the exact information that attracted them in the first place.

The purpose of your text Ads was to attract the visitor, and now that you have them on your landing page, you need to ensure that they convert. This is the goal of creating a landing page. Depending on the functionality available on your site, you need to have some call to action to get more information from the user so that they can be contacted or so that more information can be sent to them.

The call to action could be anything like buying a product via a shopping cart, getting the user to subscribe to your newsletter, or getting the user to fill in their details via a short online form. Whatever it is, you need to complete the buying cycle and offer ways for this customer to convert into buying your product or services.

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I’ve only touched on some areas of setting up and maintaining a successful Paid Search campaign and realise that it will be impossible to share with you detailed information on each subject in just one article. I do hope that this helps you at least to think about your campaign and how you plan your strategy for making a successful PPC Campaign. Good luck.