Even though you are paying for this placement, you may be able to attract higher quality traffic and generate more interest in your website, product or service. Here are the essential steps for starting your pay per click campaign.
Step 1: Define your ad budget. Google adwords, and other PPC programs, allow its users to set a daily or maximum ad budget. This option is great for tracking your campaigns and allows you to spend at a level you're comfortable with. Do an initial test or survey your market first and set a low daily limit. On the contrary, you can put up several ads all at once in different markets, if you can afford it. You then retain the ones that produce results and drop the ones that do not work.
Step 2: Identify your willingness to take on risks. Boris Mordkovich, in his book "Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing Handbook" states that PPC campaigns are less risky than traditional tri-media campaigns. However, he adds that search engines provide different ROIs. Advertising with the more popular search engines may be more costly so you need to decide if you are willing to take on the added risks.
Step 3: Select your keywords and key phrases. Most PPC programs provide their users with online tools for researching keywords. Invest in some time and effort in using keyword tools to ensure that you have an optimal list of keywords for your niche. Setup some split tests to see which keywords bring you the most results.
Step 4: Review your campaign's results. Most PPC platforms provide a convenient reporting tool that gives you the ability to adjust your campaign based on the data you gathered so far. Reports will usually include the number of clicks for each keyword, the time of day your ad was clicked, and the location of those who clicked your ads.
Step 5: Fine-tune your ads. After reviewing the reports and finding out what worked for your campaign, you can stop paying for the keywords that bought in little to no traffic, and focus your efforts on the keywords that offer a better return. Once you have this list of keywords, you can start creating compelling and unique ads, and deciding which markets and locations the ads should appear in.
The secret behind every successful Google Adwords campaign is through optimizing your campaigns by testing and tweaking. These five steps provide a basic blueprint that anyone can follow to create an effective Pay-per-click campaign.
