The 7 Keys to a Successful PPC Program

I'm leaving my series on writing copy for the Search Engines today (well you can have too much of a good thing) and instead today will provide some useful information on Pay Per Click (PPC), this being an area that, whilst it can result in sales, can also result in a lot of wasted money.

The Framework of Success

1. Define The Goals for the Campaign
   
   With every part of a marketing campaign, the goals, the 'what you want to achieve' must be laid down first, you must as they say 'start with the end in mind'. These goals can be easy to set, e.g 'cost of clicks must be 10% lower than the profit from sales' or that 'a lead is required for every £20 spent on clicks'. Others could include newsletter signups, increased number of followers on a Twitter account. The list is long and will depend on what you are trying to achieve and what sort of site you have.
   
   
2. Conduct Keyword Research
   
   Good keyword research is essential before starting any online campaign, whether it be PPC or SEO. There are various tools on the marketplace which will allow you to see what terms are being used in any vertical market place (subject area) and also which ones your competitors are using in their PPC campaigns. You can also see what terms sites are being linked to with, as this too gives an indication of what they want visitors to find them under.
   
   Beware of just using the Google Suggestion Engine, as some say that this gives you keywords that Google want you to use and not perhaps those that are best.
   
   
3. Prepare The Campaign
   
   The way in which a PPC campaign and the associated landing pages are put together has a profound impact on it's future performance. A badly constructed campaign costs more to run, is less effective and is also harder to manage.
   
   The way a campaign is built will depend on many things, are there different geographical and times of days that need to be targeted? If so, it will be necessary to set up each one of these as a stand alone group of words.
   
   When the campaigns are set you then need to divide the words into sub groups, listing all those that are 'common to each other' together. This needs to be done until the groups truly seem to be just on one subject. This makes it easier to write adverts that will match the words and also makes the whole campaign easier to manage, all 'dog keywords' are together and and 'cat keywords' are together, rather than having them all under 'Pet'.
   
   You will also have to decide if you are going to use Broad, Exact or Phrase matching, as this will have a great impact on whether you advert is triggered and what is triggered by.
   
   Beware using the Broad Match term without carefully constructing a list of 'negative keywords' (those words, that if used, will cause you advert NOT to be triggered) as otherwise you may find that you wasting clicks on the wrong market place entirely.
   
   The other important thing is that the words used in the adverts will match their associated keywords and that increases 'Quality Score' and thus reduces click costs.
   
   Take note here that the Landing pages (where the visitor goes when they click an ad) is also taken into account of scoring purposes and more importantly, this page should be built in a way that will increase conversions.
   
   
   
4. Set Your Bidding Strategy
   
   With PPC you have to set up daily budgets and also what you are willing to pay for a click. The former sets how many times your adverts will be seen, whilst the latter sets where in the lists of adverts it will appear. The best place for an advert can only be found through long and hard trial and error (you need a lot of data here), but overall I can recommend going for positions 3 -4, this being a good balance between the top zone that can cost a lot more per click, and the bottom of the page that might just not get your ad noticed enough.
   
   
5. Manage Your Bids
   
   Whatever position you decide upon, you will have to manage your bids, increasing the amount you are willing to pay per click when they drop to low and decreasing it when they climb too high. Beware here of the average position data, as it may be that your advert, while having an average of 3 is actually being seen in position 8 during the peak hours of the day (for your keyword/product), this being because the canny advertisers increase the amount they are willing to pay in these hours, thus forcing others down the list.
   
   
   
6. Analyse the Results
   
   Today those running PPC campaigns have access to a wealth of information, not only through the ever extending list of reports available from the PPC interface, but also from the likes of Google Analytics.
   
   These tools should be used to monitor the efficiency of all the keywords and their associated landing pages and will provide information as to the actual keywords used to activate the advert, how many pages were viewed and how many conversions were made.
   
   
7. Change and Test Again
   
   Once you have all the information that Analytics can give you, you can change the keyword lists (removing some and promoting others to hero status), change the advert text and also alter the landing pages that are not working as well as they should.
   
   The effect of these changes then needs to be examined and the whole process starts again.
   
   

As you can see, it is not as easy as it looks when setting up a PPC campaign, but if you follow this list you will have a far better likelihood of success.

More Tomorrow

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