Pay-Per-Click Marketing

Pay per click (PPC), also called cost per click, is an internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, in which advertisers pay the publisher (typically a website owner) when the ad is clicked. It is defined simply as “the amount spent to get an advertisement clicked.”

Getting noticed among thousands of other businesses is the key to selling goods online. Pay-per-click advertising can not only attract attention, but can go a long way towards converting interest into sales.

Steps For a Successful PPC Campaign

Analyze Your Business Goals

Before running a PPC campaign, think about what your business hopes to achieve through running a PPC campaign. Have a clear set of goals and objectives for your PPC campaign that are in sync with your company’s current marketing efforts both online and offline. Without an underlying business goal to measure success against, a PPC campaign is useless. As you pay for each click, you want the searcher to perform a valuable action. PPC efforts should be focused on an action – a purchase or a lead (usually).

These are some of the questions that you should ask yourself and the stakeholders before deciding on a PPC campaign:

• What objective should the PPC campaign accomplish?
• What are the actions you want users to take on your website? How much is each action worth to the business?
• Does our content provide value to the customer? Is it able to engage the customer enough to convert him into a lead?

Answer to the above questions help you to create a campaign that’s relevant to the business and delivers measurable results.

Defining Your Target Audience

Defining your audience is an imperative step to work out the strategy for your PPC campaign. It helps in revealing broader insights that can be used throughout your campaigns. Not only choosing the specific demographics but also considering psychographics of your target audience is the key to know whom you need to target the campaigns to. This helps to form a base to refine your communications with potential users, as well as helps to target ads, landing pages, and other elements so that goal of PPC campaign is achieved.

Conduct Keyword Research

The decisive factor in a PPC campaign lies in understanding how customers search for you and your competitors. Effective keyword search involves knowing your customer, finding out what they’re searching for, and turning those terms into strategically organized keyword groups and ad groups for your pay-per-click campaign. Each group would have its own theme, topic, or product specific to the business’s offering and the users’ needs.

An effective PPC keyword list should be:

• Relevant – Keywords that will lead to a high PPC click-through rate (CTR), a low cost per click, and increased profits. This is possible only if keywords you bid on are closely related to the offerings you sell.
• Comprehensive – Include keywords that are more specific to your offering as they would be less competitive, and therefore less expensive e.g. Long-tail keywords.
• Expansive – PPC is iterative. You need to continuously grow and refine your PPC keyword list.

Utilize negative keywords. They allow you to choose words that would prevent your ads from showing up for searches that are not relevant to your business and are unlikely to convert.

Establish a Campaign Structure

After identifying the relevant keywords for your target audience, analyze your data and structure your campaign logically around these themes. Using no more than five to ten keywords at a time, split your keyword list up into specific ad groups, and devise a campaign structure.

Create a Compelling Call-to-Action Ad Copy

After developing a campaign structure around your most logical themes and products, now it’s important to shape the offers and content for PPC ads and landing pages to fit the target audience of the ad group. For every ad group and target page on your website, create an ad copy highlighting the theme's/product's unique value proposition that differentiates it from the competition. Ad copy includes the headline, the body text, the “call to action” and the address for the landing page. Your job is to convey the benefits of your product and service better than your competitors. To gauge user's reaction, create different variants of ad copy for each ad group. This will help to determine refinements later on as you optimize your search campaigns. The whole idea is to increase the ad’s relevance by emphasizing on the unique selling point of your product or service to generate action from users.

Creation/Optimization of Landing Page

The landing page serves as the first page the user sees after clicking the ad. It communicates what your offer is and why it’s relevant to the visitor. You should make a landing page specifically dedicated to PPC, focusing completely on the action you want the visitor to perform. A good PPC landing page should succinctly answer the customer requirements. The primary purpose of the landing page is to “convert” that visitor into a customer. The “conversion” can come in the form of a sale, an appointment or an information request. Also make sure that the main keywords you’re targeting for any given ad group are contained in the page title and within HTML heading tags for that landing page.

Each landing page needs to:

• Effectively communicate the product or service that you offer
• has a clear call to action making it easy to take the required action with as few clicks as possible
• contain valuable and relevant content related to the product or service. (This could be done by using compelling words and phrases like: "Buy now", "Sign up today", "Order" or "Get a Quote")
• load fast, as page load time is a factor in determining quality score and ad rank

Configure Campaign Settings

After completing your keyword research, identifying what ad groups and keywords you want to target, creation of ad copy and landing page, the next step is to establish your campaign settings. These may seem intuitive, but if set up incorrectly they can quickly jeopardize the success of your campaign. You can control the time of day ads display, where ads display geographically, in what language ads display, and other factors like choosing device, bidding options, budget etc. As your campaigns get more complex, you can take advantage of options such as day-parting, demographic bidding, ad rotation and frequency capping.

Perform Statistical Analysis

To analyze whether campaign efforts are meeting your expectations or not, scrutinize traffic reports, click-through rates and conversion rates. Businesses must also focus on revenues generated, cost per sale and return on investment as key metrics in measuring a marketing effort’s effectiveness. For instance,

• Monitor the performance of individual ads. Pause the underperforming ads and write new variations of it based on the key message and benefits mentioned in the best performing ad. Then, repeat the test with the new copy versus the previous champion.
• Better performing keywords can have their bids increased, while underperforming keywords may be paused or have their bids decreased. You can also single out the best keywords to form the basis of new ad groups; these groups will then benefit from a lower CPC.

Enhancement of PPC Campaigns

Successful PPC campaigns are built over time, based on market data and performance. Every campaign will have successful and unsuccessful elements and keywords that need to be optimized. There are ways to further refine and optimize your PPC campaigns, and it is important to regularly monitor the performance of your campaign to ensure you are maximizing the ROI of your budget. The basic principle of PPC optimization is to keep testing and improving your campaign. You can easily review your PPC data, and determine what works and what doesn’t. Iterations of ad copy, keywords, and landing pages can make enormous differences to your campaign.

Similar to split testing ad copy, further optimization can be done through A/B testing keywords, landing pages, day parting, network targeting, and conversion optimization. Determine what performs best for your audience and move forward with that strategy. Quality scores can always be improved and ads made more relevant. Never stop testing new ideas!

Optimizing Bid Management

The science of bid management determines how much you should pay for each click you receive via PPC. The amount you pay per click is directly tied to your site and ad performance for each specific keyword in your campaign. To determine how much your website can afford to pay for each click, you need to first understand how much profit you earn when a visitor takes the target action you seek.

For instance,

If you earn $100 per sale, and each click costs you $2, you’d then need to convert one out of every 50 visitors to break even on your marketing efforts. That’s a 2% conversion rate. If your campaign was converting at 4%, and clicks were still costing you $2, you would be paying $50 for each conversion action—leading to $50 of profit. So you could effectively still be bidding up to $4 per click and retain a positive ROI, although the less you pay per click, the better, obviously.