Internet Marketing Blog

One way to ensure that traffic comes straight to your site is to take advantage of the numerous Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising programmes that are offered by the search engines and their partners.

All four major search engines – Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask – offer PPC advertising which appears either above, to the side of, or below the natural, non-paid search results.

There are three PPC providers which serve the four major search engines – Google Adwords for Google and Ask.com, Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM) for Yahoo!, and MSN adCenter for MSN.

There are variations in the way each of the PPC programmes works but there are aspects of setting up a PPC campaign that are common to all three. We will focus on these factors, giving you an idea of how all three work and how to set up your own PPC campaign.

Goal Definition

It is important to know what you wish to gain from the PPC campaign – what search terms do you wish to appear for? How much can you afford to spend per sale/lead? Remember, you will be paying for each click that comes through to your website from the PPC ad, so it is important to know what you hope to achieve from the campaign. Knowing this will allow you to better analyse the traffic you receive from the campaign and make adjustments as needed to improve the performance.

Keyword Research

Once you have defined your goals for the campaign, the next step is to undertake keyword research to determine the best terms to advertise for. There are a number of tools available to help with task. They include Google’s own Keyword Research Tool, Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery.

When choosing keywords, it can be tempting to pick terms that are broadly focused on your product or service range. Be aware that these terms may cost more per click than more specific terms and may have less chance of producing a sale due to the traffic generated not being as pre-qualified.

Similarly, when choosing keywords, consider whether the term you choose might have a dual meaning. Terms that have multiple contextual meanings can result in poor quality traffic and reduce the cost-effectiveness of your campaign.

The best keywords to choose are those that are the most specific and relevant to your products and services.

Campaign Set-up

Once you have your list of keywords, you will need to register with your chosen PPC Provider and set-up your campaign via the PPC Provider’s user interface. As mentioned before, the three main PPC Providers have their individual qualities but generally the process for setting up the campaign involves the following:

• Define Campaign settings – this involves choosing the geographic targeting – do you wish to your ads show in a specific country or region, setting the daily/monthly budgets, define whether the ads are to be shown on the search engine’s results specifically, or across the broader network of partner sites.
• Create Ad Groups – Divide your keywords into groups that have specific themes. Each group of themed keywords is known as an Ad Group due to the fact that they will trigger the same Ads. It is better to have more Ad Groups with few keywords than few Ad groups with a lot of keywords. The fewer the keywords in an Ad Group, the more relevant they will be to the Ad Group’s respective Ad. Within the Ad Group level of a PPC Campaign, you will also be able to set the maximum cost per click you wish to bid. This, in part, will determine your ranking in the PPC search results.
• Create Ads – The Ads in the campaign will be shown when the keywords in the respective Ad Group are searched for in the search engines. With this in mind, the Ads should be as relevant to their respective keywords as possible. Generally, the anatomy of a PPC Ad involves Title, Description, Display URL and Landing Page URL.
  
  The Ads should also be concise, include a call to action of sorts and deliver the user to a page that is as relevant to the searched keyword term and Ad content as possible. It is important to add a tracking code of some sort (depending on what tracking/web analytics software you use) to the Landing Page URL in order to track the performance of your campaigns through to conversion.
• Payment details - Once the Campaign, Ad Groups and Ads have been set up, the next step is to add the payment details. Depending on the PPC Provider, you will have the option of choosing either pre-paid payment – you add funds to the account – or post-pay – you will be invoiced at the end of each month or when you reach a pre-determined credit limit.

Once all of this has been carried out, you can switch on the PPC Campaign.

Monitoring the Campaign

Be sure to check the campaign’s progress once it is running. Be sure to check the cost per conversion – how much each sale or lead is costing you – and adjust either the settings of the campaign as needed. You can adjust all aspects of the campaign while it is running – the geographical targeting, the daily budgets if applicable, the ad content, the cost per click, the add content and the keywords that are live in the account.

All PPC Programmes provide reporting of campaign stats so that you can quickly compare results of different ad groups, keywords and ads.

Statistical Analysis

Once your campaign is running and sales/leads are coming through, you can further tweak the account by taking advantage of the function of tracking code that you should have added to Landing Page URLs of your Ads.

Using your webstats software, you will be able to track traffic from your PPC Campaigns through your website right up to the post conversion page i.e. the “Thanks” page. This data will enable you to see what keywords work best for your website and see if there are any changes that can be made on site to improve the conversion rate.

These last two points are probably the most important factors in a successful campaign – monitoring and analysis. So long as you regularly manage your campaigns and respond to poor performance quickly, your campaign will continue to prove you with high quality leads and business at an affordable rate.