How to run an online PPC Ad campaign (Part 1)
Well, PPC has been alive and well for a while now and Google has the millions in ad revenue to prove it. But, what exactly is PPC advertising ? PPC or Pay-Per-Click Advertising is using the online ad tools that the various players (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask etc. ) provide to place ads alongside their search results in order to drive traffic to your website. Since Google is the dominant search engine, we’ll reference them in the rest of this article.
Since you’re working with the search engines on this, you have to understand which search queries or keywords related to your business bring visitors to your site. Once those keywords are determined, then y
ou have to bid on them to get a position with that search engine results. When someone searching on the Internet enters one of your keywords, your PPC ads appear alongside the ‘natural’ search results (usually the highlighted ads on the top of the results or on the right. If the searcher is intrigued by your ad and clicks on it, you are charged for that click. Of course, what you’re charged is based on a couple of factors that Google uses to calculate your cost-per-click (CPC).
Where do you start?
SEO’s younger brother : Beginning PPC is pretty much like SEO where one of the first steps involve analyzing the relevant keywords for your website. Use tools like Google keyword tool or Wordtracker to get a sense of how many keywords are in play in the big bad search results game out there. Start with 5 keywords which are most representative of your business – move on to variations and long-tail keywords. For e.g. if you’re selling teas. Naturally, tea is a hot keyword for you – variations would be black tea, green tea etc. Long tail keywords would be black tea with orange rinds or white green tea lemon.
Keyword tests : Once you have your keyword list and have them sorted in terms of relevance and traffic – relevance meaning how closely related they are to your business and traffic meaning how many people are searching those terms on the internet- start testing them yourself. Type in those keywords and see what comes up. You’ll see ads that are competing with each other on that keyword displayed. Note the ‘relevance’ part again as you’ll view these results and accordingly decide if they work for you. You don’t have to do this for all your keywords just the highest trafficked ones.
Be as negative as possible : With keywords, that is! You’ll find that there are typically broad terms, phrase terms and exact terms that are used in PPC campaigns. Broad terms get you the most traffic and exact terms get you limited traffic since the search results will only correspond to the ‘exact’ search query typed in as opposed to broad terms which show up if they’re a part of a search query. For e.g. if you have the broad keyword ‘tea’ in your list and someone is looking for Tea Leoni and your ad is displayed, they might click on your ad and though they might leave right away, you’re still paying for that click. In such cases, just take the words that are not essential to your business and add them to a negative keyword list. This will let search engines filter out your results and only show your ad when it matters.
Set a daily budget : How much are you willing to spend to get visitors to your site? If this is your first foray into PPC, set a low daily budget until you learn the ins and outs of how this works. I always start with $50 per day. I know, it’s small potatoes but I’d rather experiment with a small budget than a large one, and only when I’ll convinced will I open up the floodgates.
Bidding on keywords : Google has a great traffic estimator tool that helps you determine how much potential traffic a keyword receives and how much that keywords typically costs on average. I usually begin my PPC bidding at the low-end and let the ads run for a day or two on a limited budget. Then, based on the search results, I modify the bids and increase them accordingly so as to get the optimum traffic. Note, this exercise is to manage my CPC and my CTR (click through rate) to improve my ad ranking. (there are other things that I’ll do to help improve the rank – see part 2 of this article for details)
Displaying your ad : Where do you want your Ad to run? With geo-targeting, most PPC ads can be shown all over the world or just in the city of St. Louis, Missouri or around a 30 mile radius around the university of Michigan. Select your appropriate location.
Finally, hit the ‘start’ button and let your campaign begin. Results do not occur overnight. CTR’s are abysmal to begin with – folks don’t trust those sponsored link things. I’ll have more on this on part 2 of this article. Till then, adios!
- Lowell D’Souza
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