Pay Per Click Getting Started

As my regular readers know I promote a holistic approach to web site development and promotion. Although I am not a great fan of Pay per Click advertising, in certain situations such as a new web site or promoting a specific product or service, PPC is the ideal approach providing attention to detail is at the forefront of the advertisers mind.

Pay per Click: A mine field

Pay per Click advertising is not for the faint hearted, bidding wars, click fraud and ensuring you meet the Search Engine's quality score are only some of the hurdles which need to be considered. The best advice for those new to PPC Advertising is to move forward in a well planned manner, and with a moderate budget to do some testing and to get a feel for the process. Heading into your first Pay per Click campaign like a bull in a china shop is very likely to result in disaster.

However, entering the PPC marketplace with some caution, pre-planning and attention to detail, a successful Pay Per Click Advertising campaign can be achieved by all, and will ultimately be beneficial to your online business activities and visibility.

PPC Basics

Know Your Audience

To really make your PPC campaign a success, your targeted audience must be clearly defined and understood. Information regarding your potential clients and customers should already be known to your business, unless of course you're in the process of a start-up, where identifying the targeted audience may still be a work in progress as part of your business plan development. Any company currently doing business should have a very good understanding of their business's audience, if not troubled times are on the horizon.

Keywords and Campaign Targeting

Targeting of your PPC campaign will prove to be much easier than you anticipate providing you have reviewed the information you have about your potential clients and understand, their needs, wants, habits and of course the keywords they use to find the products and services your web site provides.

How well the interaction and relevancy between the potential visitor (the clicker), the keywords (the ad), and the proposal (the landing page / sales funnel) will determine whether or not your campaign is a success or a failure. This interaction is at the forefront of the ultimate goal for any Search Marketing campaign, a successful conversion. The research, identification and selection of keywords will be the driving force behind this success.

It's all connected

Keywords play an integral role in Pay per Click advertising, understanding the relationship between keywords and the campaign as a whole assists to develop campaigns which are targeted and successful.

• Keywords act as red flags to attract Internet users. After all these are the terms they used in Search and are at the forefront of their thought process when using search to fulfill their needs.
• Keywords integrate into an ad heading and content to show relevancy between an Internet users search and the offerings within the search results.
• Keywords Included on the ad's landing page and integrated throughout the sales funnel process supports the overall relevancy required to retain visitors interest and improves the campaigns quality scores by the search engines.

Keywords are the foundation

As you can see keywords are the foundation of any PPC campaign. Your campaign starts with the identification of the keywords used to find your products and services and follows through the whole advertising process to build campaigns which are targeted to the thought process of the web site visitor, and linked to the conversion goals identified by your business for your PPC campaign.

Preliminary PPC Keyword Research

There are numerous keyword research tools available such as Google's Adwords Keyword Tool and Wordstreams Keyword organizer both excellent tools to get you started with your PPC keyword research. Even when using these tools there are a few things to keep in mind such as:

• Think like your customer. What keywords and phrases will your customers use to find products and services or to find solutions to problems.
• One word keywords are generic and not focused enough to drive targeted traffic, and their use results in excessive click costs.
• Don't forget negative words in your keyword research program. An example is "free" if you are not offering any free items in your campaign this is an excellent example of a negative keyword.
• Learn about Keyword Match Types and how they affect your keyword costs and targeting. More about Match Types can be found on this Blog Post: Reducing Pay Per Click Costs

The Pay Per Click Ad

Although you are limited in the content you can include in the ad's title and content, care should be taken when crafting your advertisement. The two main considerations when writing the advertisement are:

• Ensure you use the keyword prominently in the title and preferably in the content area.
• It is important to encourage the "click" by using a call to action such as "Act Now"

Ad groups are an effective way to improve the performance and targeting of your campaign. Additional information on Ad Groups can be found on the following Blog Post: Ten Ways To Improve PPC Campaigns

The Landing Page

I so often see Pay Per Click campaigns fail due to either the lack of development of an ad specific landing page with ads using destination page such as the web site's Home Page, or a Landing Page that does not meet the relevancy requirements to the ad linked to the page.

It is important to develop, or at the very least ensure you are targeting a page which has high relevance to the linking advertisement. There are two primary reasons for this:

• The relationship between the advertisement and the landing page are linked to the Search Engines quality score for the ad which can affect both ad placement in the search results and ad cost.
• The Internet user has developed expectations from the ad content and the landing pages must meet these expectation otherwise it is highly likely the you will be paying for a click the does not result in a conversion.

The Last Word

Pay Per Click has its place in most Web Site Promotion Programs as part of a Holistic Approach. Many of the other strategies used to drive traffic to web sites such as Organic SEO and Social Media Optimization can take time to be effective.

Alternatively, PPC drives traffic immediately upon the ads going live which is one of the biggest advantages of using this method. However, the downside of this equation is as soon as the ads stop running, so does the traffic and it is for this reason that I prefer to use PPC for only specific circumstances, as apposed to the primary driver of web site traffic due to the required ongoing costs.