Sheppix

People new to PPC – specifically the small business owner/do-it-yourselfer—often become jaded when it comes to PPC. They follow the deceptively simple process: create a campaign, pick a handful of keywords, make an ad, enter your billing information, and watch as your money flies out the window. From that point on, they assume PPC simply doesn’t work, when in reality it is just much more complicated than Google and Bing make it seem going in.

For those of you who are new to PPC, I don’t want you to become jaded. I want you to love PPC as much as I do! Here are a few simple tips to help set you and keep you on the right track.

 

1. Think about your Quality Score

It used to be that quality score didn’t matter. You could get away with having hundreds of keywords in one ad group. But this led to almost completely irrelevant ad text in relation to the keyword searched. Rather than having one ad group and hundreds of keywords in that group, launch the account with very specialized ad groups, each consisting of no more than 15-20 keywords. Then write ads relevant to these specific groups.

Here’s an example: Say you own a landscaping business where you offer lawn mowing, weed mediation, tree trimming, and tree removal. If you have one group with all of these products being offered, it is impossible to consistently serve relevant ads to the searcher. You might have an ad offering general landscaping services, but if someone searches for Tree Removal, Kansas City and they see your general landscaping ad, they will not be very likely to click on your ad. But if your ad offered “Tree Removal Services,” the searcher would be much more inclined to interact with your ad.

 

2. Use Relevant Landing Pages

This ties in very strongly to having relevant ad text and specialized ad groups. Using the example above, if the searcher clicks on your “Tree Removal” ad and is sent to your website’s home page, or a page discussing lawn mowing, you can be sure that they will bounce right off your website. They won’t stick around for more than a couple seconds. However if your Tree Removal ad sends them to a page discussing your various tree removal techniques and safety information, they will be much more likely to convert into a customer. Your ad’s landing page must be relevant to the keyword the searcher enters. Period.

 

3. Bid on Your Brand Name

It is common to assume that you don’t need to use your PPC budget bidding on your brand name because you probably already rank first for your brand naturally. Throw this misconception out the window.

Even if you do rank number one on your brand name, not all searches click on organic listings. In fact, many people, don’t even know that search engine ads are ads at all! They click on the first listing on the search engine results page…and guess what; the first listing is an ad. Furthermore, due to new trademark policies, your competitors are able to bid on your brand. You need to keep a step ahead of them and not let them steal a customer who is actively looking for you!

 

4. Test Your Ads

This is probably the most overlooked piece of PPC advertising – even by larger agencies. Adwords and AdCenter make it easy to test ad copy and find out what text works best with your customers. Take advantage of this ability. Continually rotate new ads into your ad groups and run the ones that have the best click rates and conversion rates. You want to drive qualified traffic to your website, don’t hinder yourself by sticking to one ad forever.

 

5. Track your campaigns

The only way to know what is working and what is not is to track your campaigns. Both Adwords and AdCenter offer free conversion tracking. Google offers analytics for free as well. These tools are absolutely invaluable when analyzing your PPC efforts. If you don’t know specifically what worked and what didn’t, you will make many incorrect decisions simply based on assumptions. You need to know what keywords work better than others. You need to know what ad groups perform better. And you need to know what time of the day your ads perform best. Use this information to constantly optimize your campaigns. Without tracking your campaigns using analytics and conversion tracking, how can you know what you need to change? The short answer is, you can’t.

By following these 5 steps, I sincerely hope you will fall in love with PPC advertising and will appreciate its value. This is one of the most efficient advertising outlets that exist today, and these steps will put you on the right path to generating positive results.