Being highly visible on the SERP through PPC advertising is a key strategy for acquiring quality web traffic.
Most businessmen today, depend on search based traffic to increase their share of leads, sales, growth, and revenue.
But for newer websites and those who aren’t doing well organically, paid search plays a vital role in bringing consistent traffic to their sites.
PPC is a great way of getting targeted audience to your website by publishing ads on the search engines.
So, you’re ready to bounce and advertise your business on search engines with PPC campaigns?
Great!
But before you start, you need to plan how you are going to make it work effectively for your business.
Here are top 8 tasks that you need to complete before starting PPC campaign
1. Know what your Goals are
Can you grow your business and take over the PPC advertising without having a proper goal?
No!
Well, if you don’t set measurable goals you won’t get there.
Generally, you already know your destination at the beginning of any journey.
Same is the case with PPC. Before embarking PPC journey, make sure you have a roadmap to follow.
Before setting up your PPC campaign and running it, the very first thing you need to decide is what your goals are.
Remember, a PPC campaign with no goals is doomed Click To Tweet
Setting goals is a good thing but abiding by those goals is simply perfect.
Once you have set your goals, make sure that you hold yourself to them to achieve PPC success.
You should have a clear view of where your company is standing right now and to what level you want to take it through PPC advertising.
Different businesses have a different set of goals. You should decide directly what the entire goal for your website is.
Whether it is to persuade visitors to sign up for a newsletter, give you their contact details, increased sales or a simple visit to your website.
Knowing what you want to get out of your PPC campaign will help you to reach your target result.
Moreover, set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely) goals for your campaigns.
2. Determine your Budget
Knowing the budget for your PPC campaign bears uttermost importance.
Not having a defined budget will let your PPC campaign run wildly and you will end up spending more than planned.
As the name suggests, with PPC campaigns you will have to pay for every click. Click To Tweet
So, You need to carefully think about how much you can afford to spend overtime.
When setting up your budget for the entire campaign, generate a total budget for the campaign and then segment it on the basis of monthly, weekly, and daily budgets.
Your budget will be different depending on your industry and how much competition already exists for the keywords you want to target.
For example, if you are a bakery owner, your keyword might cost you around 30 cents. On the other hand, if you are an automobile part owner you might end up paying around 5 dollars for a keyword.
Examine your PPC campaigns on a regular basis and associate together the campaign goals and budget to generate maximum ROI.
3. Recognize your Target Audience
In PPC advertising, audience targeting is the focal point.
With PPC campaigns, you need to think about who are you selling to and what they’re needs are.
As with traditional marketing, knowing your target audience in digital marketing is also very significant.
Without, a comprehensive understanding of your target audience, it can be quite difficult for you to create compelling ads that will attract potential customers.
Audience targeting becomes really important if you are running more than one PPC campaign.
With multi campaigns, you can aim to hit different target market for each of your campaigns.
This is important if you are running gender or location specific campaigns.
In highly specific campaigns, creating campaigns without having the knowledge of the target market can lead to assured failure.
The importance of identifying your target audience is even more essential in online marketing than offline because the competition in online marketing is far fiercer and the shopping process is faster.
Moreover, throwing a net too wide can lead to wasted time and money.
Whatever your business challenge is, reaching your target audience is imperative and essential.
4. Organize a Keyword List
Setting up and maintaining strong and high performing PPC campaign takes time, budget, and expertise.
But without a continuous keyword research throughout the campaign, you will never get the best possible return on your investment.
The keywords that you select for your campaign will eventually determine when your ads will show up for various search results.
Good keywords will make sure that your ad is shown to the relevant target that is more likely to convert.
Pick keywords carefully and consciously and create a comprehensive keyword list out of them.
Add only those keywords to your list which are relevant to your business. Click To Tweet
Include everything that relates to your business like the general terms, specific terms, misspelled terms etc.
Put yourself in the shoes of your customers and then search for your company to bring out the keywords and combination of terms that work best for you.
This will help you to find the lesser used keywords that are inexpensive and can still generate good results for you.
You should also try to avoid “broad match” keywords as they pull in irrelevant search results.
Use negative keywords also.
Negative keywords allow you to be more specific in eliminating irrelevant search traffic.
By eliminating irrelevant search traffic, you can ensure that your ads will show up to those people who are more likely to buy your product or service.
5. Have Well Optimized Landing Page
The next step to determine after mining the keywords are where are you going to send the people who will click on your ad.
To the homepage?
A big NO
It becomes important for you to decide what page of your site is more relevant to the campaign you are running.
The page which bears relevance to your campaigns is called a Landing Page. Click To Tweet
You might be wondering what exactly is the difference between a home page and a landing page.
The home page is an introductory page of your website, typically serving as a table of contents for your website.
Whereas a landing page is a distinct page on your website that is built for one single conversion objective.
If you drop all your PPC customers on your homepage, there will be high chances for you to lose your potential customers and bounce rate of your website will increase which is not a sign at all.
So, do not redirect your ads to the homepage, instead create a separate landing page that tells elaborately about the product/offer.
A landing page is always better as it brings in more conversions and improves the CTR. That is why landing pages are an essential part of PPC advertisement.
Use keywords that have high conversion rate in the right amount for your landing page. Also, insert quality graphics and images in your landing page to enhance conversions.
To get good ROI you will need to make sure that your landing page converts the traffic into leads and sales.
The major goal for your landing page should be to turn site visitors into leads and sales.
You should have a landing page with relevant content that immediately addresses what a visitor is looking for after a single click.
This will improve your user experience and quality score.
6. Get Ready with your Conversion Tracking
The beautiful thing about PPC marketing is that you get a chance to track everything.
Yes, EVERYTHING
One of the most important factors in monitoring the success of your campaign is installing conversion tracking on your website.
Every PPC manager has a common nightmare, that is finding an account that doesn’t have any form of conversion tracking.
Conversion come in different forms, some of them are:
- Inquiry Forms
- Contact Us Forms
- Purchasing a Product
- Requesting a Call Back
- Making a Phone Call
- Downloading an Ebook, PDF, Brochure
- Engaging in Live Chat
If you track any of the above-mentioned forms of conversions, you will be able to identify which keywords and ads are the best performers for your business.
Implementing Conversion Tracking should be a high priority for you as it shows you exactly where your campaign value lay.
Conversion Tracking lets you identify how well your ad campaigns are generating leads, sales, downloads, email sign-ups and other key actions for your business.
The data that is recorded by conversion tracking allows you to recognize the working and the non-working areas of your PPC campaigns.
By this, you can optimize your bids, ad text and keywords as and when required.
You should also note that conversion tracking not only benefits your PPC accounts, but it also helps you to determine what other channels of marketing are proving beneficial for your business.
7. Identify your Competitors
Analyzing your competitor’s PPC campaigns is a great way pull out data about their company’s conversion strategies and methods.
The conflict for leads, sales, customers and revenue through PPC advertising is fierce and it’s getting rougher day by day to differentiate yourself from your competitors.
Just like you, your competitors are also bidding on brand terms and keywords which lead to the bidding war.
This bidding war increases the CPC.
Conduct a comprehensive analysis of your competitor’s impression share, keywords, ads, landing pages, messages, offers etc.
The above analysis will give you a better understanding of the competition and will reveal ways to improve your conversion funnel.
Analyzing the ads of your competitor is also a way to see what all your ad are missing.
The process to analyze your competitor’s PPC campaign is as follows:
- Define who are your competitors.
- Do a quick assessment of how quick are they.
- What is their USP and how is that different from your business?
- What do you want to draw out from their data?
- Optimize your campaigns accordingly.
Discovering the strengths and weaknesses as well as keeping a close eye on your competitor’s each move is highly required.
8. Hiring the Right PPC Agency
For PPC marketing, hiring an agency is always preferred over individual account manager.
As the individual account manager has a multitude of responsibilities, PPC management agencies can solely focus on the art of PPC.
PPC agencies concentrate on recognizing and working with global search trends and constantly keep themselves updated.
PPC needs constant attention if it is to be done correctly. Click To Tweet
PPC agencies have no responsibilities other than that of optimizing the PPC campaigns and accounts.
PPC advertising is a performance oriented industry and hence, an agency has to deliver best results in order to sustain.
Before finalizing the industry, check how have they advertised their own agency.
This will give you an insight of their advertising skills and expertise.
Also check whether the company is solely involved in PPC activities or if it offering a lot more services like web designing, web development, SEO, SMO.
If the agency is engaged in various activities then reject the agency at once.
Merely choosing an agency is not enough, you should choose the right PPC agency that correlates with your business goals.
Because PPC requires relentless attention and involvement of an entire team where professionals together work toward building best service in the market.
To get the best of PPC advertising, have a brainstorming session with an agency professional on the following points:
- The nature of your product or service.
- If you have offers or discounts to promote.
- Why would the customers buy your product/service?
- How is the offer of your product/service different from that of your customers?
- How your competitors are promoting their products/service and how is their campaign going on?
- What has been your company’s strength over years?
- Who are your target customers?
These points will enable the agency professional to bring out the possibilities that will make your PPC campaigns fruitful.
Conclusion
PPC advertising is a great way to receive instant exposure to your website.
It increases your chances of seeing an immediate growth in revenue.
However, if you rush into it without a proper plan or without any experience, you increase the risk of burning your entire budget very quickly.
The above 8 tasks are crucial in not only determining what is right for your PPC campaigns but they are also essential in developing and implementing successful campaigns.
Originally published at adstriangle.com on February 28, 2017.
