The PPC campaign can make or break your online business. Either you can get a lot of traffic for the right keywords at the right price to optimize your ROI, or it can all be a waste of time, money and a lot of hard work. So be careful when you are planning or running the campaign. Here is a checklist of what you should do to make the campaign successful.
7 Key Factors for PPC Success
#1 – Select the Right Keywords
You must select the keywords that are closely related to the product you are promoting. You can use the free keyword tool of Google for this. Begin my making a list of keywords that are closely related to your business, and run them one at a time in the tool. Not only will the tool offer you alternative suggestions, but you can also find the competition for each one of them, and the expected traffic as well.
There are three types of keywords – primary, secondary and long tail. Primary keywords bring in more traffic, but they cost more too. So one approach could be to run a campaign with just a few primary keywords – this allows you to control the cost. Another approach could be to not target these primary keywords at all, but include a lot of secondary and long tail keywords. Though each one of these will not bring in high traffic individually, but when you have a lot of such keywords, you can still generate good traffic. And since these keywords cost less, you can save money too.
#2 – Aim for the Target Audience
Before running the campaign, you should understand your target audience. In other words, you should know what kind of people are most likely to search for your product – and whether they would carry out a local, national or a worldwide search. Based on your findings, you can decide about the parameters you need to set at the AdWords campaign. If your market is just the US and Canada, you can target your campaign for just these two countries. Google AdWords also allows you to run city specific campaigns. So if you can find out which cities are more likely to give you better revenues, then you can target the campaign for just these cities.
#3 – Make the Copy Attractive and Relevant
Try to include the keyword in the header of your advertisement – this improves the ‘click through rate’ (CTR) because the keyword will be in ‘bold’. You can include some critical words such as ‘discount’, ‘sale’, ‘low price’, ‘high quality’ and others like this. Remember, a higher CTR will mean that your advertisement will be displayed higher at a lower ‘cost per click’ (CPC).
#4 – Make Your Landing Page Relevant
When someone clicks on your advertisement and visits the landing page, the person should find your page relevant. And the product on offer should be easy to find as well. This is very important to reduce your bounce rate. So do ensure that you follow up the offer made in your copy at the landing page. For example, if the copy mentions about a ‘50% Discount’, you can include a Headline that repeats this in the landing page.
#5 – Split Test the Advertisements
No matter how good a writer you are, all your advertisement copies will never work. There can also be several versions of the landing page and some of them will always work better than others. Google allows you to split test various landing pages and advertisement copies and you should make the best use of this. So once you have identified the landing page that converts better, you should try to improve the advertisement copy for it. A high CTR and a high landing page conversion is a great combination.
#6 – Spend What You Can Afford
The more money you spend, the more traffic you will get. But it might not be a good idea to set your ‘daily budget’ too high at the very beginning. Spending too much early on can make you go out of budget very soon, with minimal results. The better approach would be to start low and find out which campaigns are working – the keywords and copies that are generating traffic, the position that is getting you the most clicks, and the landing pages that are converting better. Tweak the campaign regularly. Do not be obsessed with higher ranks for the advertisements. Number 5 may work better than number 2. Slowly increase the budget once you are confident about the ROI. Concentrate on the ROI instead of clicks.
#7 – Monitor the Campaign Regularly
In the beginning, you have to monitor the campaign regularly. Since you are spending money for the clicks, you should know where they are going, and the copies, landing pages and the keywords that are bringing you revenues. If the ‘Cost Per Conversion’ is more than the selling price, tweak the campaign until it comes down to below the sales price, because this is where you start to make some profit.
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