In PPC process, the advertiser only pays the publisher when someone clicks on an ad to their site and it also known as a ‘click-through’. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is one of the most time effective, efficient ways to drive decent amounts of targeted traffic to your website in short order. A well thought out plan that targets the correct visitors and caters to their needs will almost certainly pay dividends in the long run. This article consisting of the Dos and Don’t of PPC campaign to running a smooth, profitable PPC campaign.
Do’s
- Perform sufficient keyword research before deciding which keyword phrases to target with your campaign. The Google Adwords Keyword Tool is free to use and produces substantial information that is critical to the success of your efforts. The research when done right, will produce results you hadn’t expected and will uncover opportunities you never knew existed.
- Add “negative” keywords to your campaign to filter out irrelevant traffic.
- Take the time to craft your ads that will cater to the needs of your target audience, using the correct keywords as a result of your research. When you’re paying to get people to your site, it’s critical to make sure that the people you’re paying to attract are actually interested in your products or services.
- With PPC management, trial and error is often the name of the game. If you’re confused with making a decision about your landing page — whether to include the price of your service, for example — create two pages and see which one is most effective.
- Make turn your PPC ads into portals to give your prospective customers a direct path the what they’re seeking. On the internet, a visitor can leave your site and visit the next one on the list in less than 10 seconds. Give them what they want as efficiently as you can, and they’re guaranteed to be more likely to choose you over your competitors.
Don’t
- Don’t select the keywords to target purely on the basis of search volume. Consider the fact that a highly searched phrase is going to have more advertiser competition – and the more competition means the cost to target that keyword will be higher. Second, and more important than the cost factor, consider the relevance of the keyword with respect to the searcher’s desires, and compare that to the actions on your website that you’d like the visitor to take (conversion). If the keyword is not conducive to these conditions, it is not worth the higher cost to justify the lower conversion rate.
- Don’t take the brick and mortar retail philosophy to your online marketing efforts. Just getting them in the door isn’t good enough. The best PPC ads lead directly to or as close to the targeted page as possible. So many companies operate their campaigns by pointing all of their ads to lead to the home page of their site – therefore expecting the visitor – that they paid to attract mind you – to do more searching on your site in order to find what they’re looking for.
- Don’t write your ads to try to attract as many visitors as possible. If someone is looking for fishing lures, and you’ve written a generic ad targeting all sorts of angling equipment even though you only sell pontoon boats, your ad will mislead many people into clicking and visiting your site and they’ll stay for about eight or nine seconds until they realize that you don’t offer what they’re after. They’ll bounce out of your site as quickly as they arrived and move on to your competitor, forgetting about you and only leaving you a little lighter in your advertising budget. The more narrowly focused your niche, the more specific your ad needs to be.
- Don’t believe for one minute that operating a PPC campaign is a ‘set-it-and-forget-it’ endeavor. Offline advertising mediums such a billboard and television ads are costly, and their effectiveness is speculative at best. The internet allows you to experiment for a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing tactics, and then adjust your strategies according to what’s working and what isn’t.