Munir Ahmad Blog

Pay-Per-Click campaigns are an immediate source of traffic to your Web site or blog, and can potentially be a crucial part of your marketing success. Before you jump in head first, though, I would like to provide a guide on how to go about starting a PPC program.

You can with little effort, following these steps transform your website from unknown to a successful and profitable business tool:

1. Determine the Goals and Objectives of your PPC campaign
2. Determine your budget
3. Create a landing page
4. Choose a PPC network
5. Research keywords and key phrases
6. Create the ads you will use
7. Turn your ads on
8. Measure your success
9. Revisit, and make one change to your campaign
10. Repeat steps 8 and 9

Determine the Goals and Objectives of your PPC campaign

This obvious, yet crucial step is necessary to determine the success of your campaign. Typically, the major objectives are:

1. To make a sale
2. To obtain a lead
3. To get a phone call or visit to your business
4. To brand your company, blog, Web site
5. To make money from your Web site through affiliate programs, etc.

If you take the “I’ll just get traffic, and see what happens” approach, you do not have clearly defined or measurable goals. Some of the above objectives are easier to measure than others, but success in anything has some sort of relative measurement, So, determine what your goal is, and make future changes accordingly.

Determine Your Budget

This step is a bit like taking a trip to Vegas. Take as much as you can afford to lose. The first time you start a PPC campaign, you need to realize that just because you are paying for clicks does not guarantee anything. You must be able to afford to lose money for a short time, until you are able to measure, analyze, and adjust your campaign until you reach scalable metrics.

Create a Landing Page

This is yet another crucial step that you should not ignore. A landing page is the page that your visitors will reach when they click on your ad. The landing page should include a means to your end goal or objective. For instance, if your objective is to make a sale, your landing page should include the product(s) you wish to sell, a clear call-to-action, and a quick and easy way to make a purchase. If you want to acquire a lead, you must present a need or desire that will be fulfilled by the user submitting their information, and a form that is either on the page or maximum 1 click away, and is as simple as you can possibly make it. I will explain more about landing pages in a later post, as this is another topic that can be greatly expanded upon, but the poing of creating a landing page is to send your visitors directly to what they were looking for when they typed in a search term, and then clicked on your ad.

Choose a PPC network

There are many PPC networks to choose from, but to start, choosing one of major search engines is your best bet, as you will get the best measurement of success, more volume, and higher-quality clicks. If you haven’t already heard, the top 3 are Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter. You can typically find deals for signing up, like free credits.

Research Search Terms

Once you sign up with your provider, you will be able to use their built-in keyword tools to find keywords to add to your campaign. You want to choose the most relevant terms for your campaign, and determine how popular your search terms are. You can also do this without opening an account by using some of the free keyword research tools, such as Yahoo’s keyword suggestion tool or Google’s free keyword tool. There are also many great programs out there like WordTracker and Web CEO. Use these tools by entering some of the key phrases in your landing page. For instance, this blog is about PPC campaigns, so I would type that in, and the tool will give you other suggestions, and an average number of searches you can expect. This helps to broaden your keyword base, but getting too broad will result in non-relevant clicks to your site, which have less potential to create conversions. Try different combinations of keywords and key phrases, and measure which ones give you the best conversions.

Creating your PPC ads

After you have your landing pages set up, the next step is to create the ads or creatives that will be shown for your PPC campaign. When writing creative copy, you have limited space, so getting straight to the point of your ad, and setting the expectation of what the user will see when a visitor clicks on your ad is key. You want to have a clear call to action in your ad, as well as matching the text in your ad to the text on the landing page. It is proven that higher conversion rates come from relative ad copy to the landing page. Don’t try to fool your visitors into clicking on your ad, then sending them to something they aren’t even looking for. This is a quick way to get your visitors to bounce, as well as deplete your budget.

Turn Your Ads On

Now it’s time to turn your ads on, and start getting traffic to your pages. In Google, as well as other PPC programs, you have the ability to turn your ads on to run 24/7 or to set certain timeframes. In addition, you can choose to run your ads evenly spread out throughout the day, or run ads until they budget is reached, which will show you how quickly your budget can be reached. There are many strategies to dayparting your ads, which is running your ads from, for instance, 12pm-4pm. These are some of the adjustments you may want to make after testing your ads, and measuring when you receive the best-converting traffic.

Measure Your Success

After your ads are running, you need to measure your success. There are a few ways to measure. One of the first measures is your click-through-rate or CTR. Your CTR is figured by dividing the number of clicks by the number impressions you receive. Here is an example: 476 impressions and 8 clicks would be a CTR of 1.7% (8/476=.0168).

Along with click-through-rate, or CTR, conversion rate is figured by taking the number of conversions, (you determine what a conversion is, this could be a lead, sale, or sign-up) and dividing it by the number of clicks you received. For instance, if you received 2 conversions out of 8 clicks, your conversion rate would be 25% (2/8=.25).

You also will want to see how much a conversion is costing you at these rates. To do this, you need to take your total spend for the clicks you received divided by the number of conversions, and this will give you your cost per conversion. For instance, if you spend $18 for 8 clicks, which led to 2 conversions, your cost per conversion would be $9.00 ($18/2).

By measuring the success of your PPC campaign, you will see how close you are to your budget for each conversion, and then adjust your campaign accordingly to get the biggest bang for your buck.

Revisit and Make One Change to Your Campaign

After you have measured the success of your campaign, try making a change to your creative or landing page. It is best to make only one change at a time, so that you can determine which changes result in either higher CTR on your creative, or higher conversion. The smallest changes can make a huge difference in your click-through, and conversion rates. You will want to constantly tweak your ppc campaign in order to get the best ROI. Some changes you can make are: changing the ad title, changing the headline on your landing page, changing the positioning of the form on your landing page, changing your bid amount for keywords, adding keywords, and negative keywords, changing your schedule of showing your ads (dayparting). There is no magic formula to a successful PPC campaign, the key is to constantly try to improve your CTRs, conversion rates, and drive your costs down as low as you can get them.

Repeat Steps 8 and 9

As I said earlier, you must constantly keep an eye on your campaigns, and determine what changes increase your bottom line. If your changes make your CTR or conversion rate lower, revert the change back, and make another tweak somewhere else. Whatever you do, don’t just set your campaign and go. You should also plan on a certain amount of your budget to be “test” money, as the first shot out isn’t usually going to give you exactly the results you are looking for unless you are very lucky. Managing a PPC campaign can be very time consuming, and changes must be able to be made very quickly to minimize losing too much money without results. If you find that you do not have the time to constantly keep your campaigns updated, test, and refresh, you may want to consider hiring an internet marketing professional. A professional can make adjustments to your ads, budgets, keywords and landing pages that they have learned through trials of past campaigns, and can dedicate the attention needed so you won’t give up on your PPC campaign before it has a chance to gain momentum.

In the meantime, start on these first steps, get your goals set, and do your research. If you have any questions or comments, please let me know your thoughts. Happy marketing!