RootsWebSolutions

So you have made the decision to jump in and start running your first PPC Campaign. I guess you are pretty unsure where to start at this moment in time and you’ve probably heard a few horror stories about small businesses who’ve blown loads of money and seen very few leads coming from their advertising spend. Well hopefully this guide will help you to get started and avoid a few of those common mistakes that many PPC beginners make.

Before you begin your PPC campaign you need to make sure of 2 key factors:

You have a well designed professional website: this will help you for two reasons, firstly it will help to improve your conversion rates as customers will trust your site and secondly it will improve your Google quality score. Google Adwords charge poorly designed websites more for their ads than their well designed and mobile web friendly counterparts.

You define a PPC advertising strategy for your business, set out your goals and make a commitment to run on your PPC campaign for at least 3 months, by budgeting and running a campaign for 12-13 weeks you will get lots of data to see which advertisements are converting well and whether or not you are getting a positive return on your advertising spend. By having some clear goals to start with you will be able to measure the success of your campaign.

Create a PPC Keyword List

Keyword research is very important when starting to plan your advertisements.

But, what are keywords? Keywords are the words or phrases your customers would use when searching in the search engines for your product or service. Start buy looking at the main products you offer on your website and write down as many synonyms and variations that you can think of.

For example if you were a Garden Buildings Retailer you might have keywords such as:

Sheds
Wooden Sheds
Metal Sheds
Garden Sheds
Wendy Houses
Child Playhouse
Summerhouses

You also want to add in brand terms e.g. Sony Television and transactional terms e.g. Buy Television as they can often be cheaper than more generic keyword phrases and they will convert visitors into customers better.

If you are struggling to think of keywords for your advertisements you can try using the Google Keyword Tool or my favourite research tool at the moment UberSuggest. Simply put a keyword into either of the tools and hit search. You can export the list of suggested keywords into a CSV file and also take a note of the number of searches per month. There is some debate as to whether or not these values are to be totally relied upon but they will show you which phrases are the most popular.

Now you probably have hundreds of keywords if not thousands on your list, I recommend that you start with no more than 50 keywords for your first PPC campaign. The keywords you choose want to have a good search volume, they do not want to be too generic i.e. Television and they do not want to be too specific e.g. places to find televisions online

Keyword research is an ongoing process but a great list will get you started in the right direction.

Writing Effective Ads

Every single time a person searches for something with Google all the advertisers that have chosen those keyword phrases are automatically entered in to an auction, for every keyword in your AdWords account you assign a maximum bid, which is the amount you are willing to pay per click.

However, the stronger your CTR on Google, the lower your bid needs to be in order to reach the higher ad positions. The current Google Adwords limits are: