Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is an excellent way to get traffic onto your website affordably and quickly. However, many people make major mistakes that leave their PPC campaign in ruins. PPC works through such programs as Facebook Ads and Google AdWords in which you specify how much you’re willing to pay in exchange for a visitor who clicks through to your website. Although PPC may sound simple enough, if you are a beginner then there are many variables of a successful PPC ad that can make it more complicated than it looks. Here are six tips to creating a successful PPC campaign so that you can drive the maximum amount of traffic to your website.
What exactly do you want to gain from your PPC campaign? Before you create and optimize your campaign, you should have a clear vision of what you want out of it. This goal likely is related to gaining more business but get more specific. For instance, do you want to deliver a message, gain more website traffic, generate more leads, conversions, sales or downloads? Having a clear goal will help you in using the best techniques to get the most out of your PPC campaign.
Use such websites as Wordtracker to perform keyword research to find great keywords. Unlike SEO in which the primary concern is finding the right keywords for your copy, in PPC, you are looking for different matches—exact, phrase, and broad. If you are just starting your first PPC campaign, then you should start out with broad matches to determine what people are searching and what the market is doing. Once you’ve established the best keywords, you should then dip into exact matches.
An excellent technique to find the right keywords is to utilize phrase and broad matches, but also input any negative keywords that you don’t want to turn up. For instance, if you search “shampoo” with a broad match then the results might show “dry shampoo”, “carpet shampoo” etc. To only return with the best keywords, it’s best to add negative keywords, i.e., the keywords that you do not want such as “carpet” or “dry” so that you eliminate much of your search wastage. Doing so will allow you to get more of the searches that you’re looking for.
Content network placement refers to sites that show PPC ads in blocks on its pages, whereas search network placement means the PPC ads that show up when someone does a search on a search engine. Many people who are new to PPC marketing will make the mistake of choosing to do both content and search networks when they are first setting up their campaign. They also will use the same ad content, payment amount, and keywords for both types of placements. However, it’s best to separate them out to customize each type of placement.
Utilize Yahoo Web Analytics or Google Analytics to aid you in looking for PPC and SEO keywords. Make sure you look at your bounce rates, as these are very crucial indicators of your PPC. If you have a high bounce rate of more than 50 percent, but also a high CT rate of 3 percent or greater, then it’s an indication that you need to fix your landing pages. Make sure that your copy matches your PPC ad and that your copy is above the fold. Also, ask yourself whether or not you make it clear of what you want users to do next whether it’s to subscribe or buy your product.
Writing great copy is no easy task. However, to ensure that you’re maximizing your campaign’s ROI, it’s recommended that you test several variations of your ads to see which one performs the best. The majority of PPC platforms will let you create split tests that put out different ads for your targeted keywords. To test out your ads, ensure that you adjust the setting so that the ads are put out randomly instead of with the platform’s formula of choosing the one that it thinks will get the most clicks.
