Build a PPC Campaign: The Basics

Posted by David on Nov 8, 2010 in Pay Per Click | 0 comments

Once you have successfully used keyword research tools to locate a profitable market that you can tailor products for, you can begin launching your pay-per-click (PPC) campaign. PPC campaigns basically involve finding relevant keywords, bidding on your keywords, writing ads and then monitoring traffic flow to your site. Here is the step-by-step process for building a PPC campaign.

1.      Research the market to find a product that is in high demand or find a need that you can create a product for.

2.      Use keyword research tools such as the one available on the Google Adwords site to find keywords that people are searching for which is related to the market you’re interested in. But you should not only conduct vertical searches, but lateral ones as well. To illustrate, if you are researching the keyword “used cars”, don’t just expand the keyword phrase to “used blue cars” or “used blue cars 2007” but also use synonyms and related terms such as “used blue sedans” and “second hand cars”.

3.      Check your competition for the market. You can do this simply by searching for your keywords and key phrases on Google or other search engines and looking at how many ads appear in the search results pages. If there are too many ads, then the keyword may be highly competitive and you may want to find another one. On the other hand, if there are only a few ads, then it may indicate that there is little money to be made in this particular market since people are not spending on it.

4.      Create ad groups by grouping your list of keywords based on a major theme or main keyword. Then, research an additional ten to twenty keywords related to the main keyword or phrase for each ad group.

5.      Write your ads, making sure you use the basic AIDA (attention-interest-desire-action) copywriting principles used for creating an effective sales page. Create one ad per ad group, making sure that the main keyword or phrase is used in the headline, since this has been proven to generate higher conversion levels.

6.      Split test your ads so that you can constantly improve your PPC campaigns and generate more profitable clicks. Split testing is vital to the success of your campaigns, since even minute changes can severely affect your click-through rate as well as the number of sales you generate. Fortunately, real-time software allows you to test your ads and get the results back in a matter of hours or days, rather than the months that more conventional testing would entail.

Of course, you have to set up a Google AdWords account, where you can set a daily budget as well as the maximum cost-per-click that you are willing to pay for each keyword. The cost per click is the amount you will pay every time someone clicks on your ad. To illustrate, if you are in the currency-trading niche, and want to advertise using the keyword “forex”, you could pay anywhere from $1 to $8 per click. Once your daily budget has been exhausted, Google will simply stop showing your ads for the remainder of the day. Hence, if you take $5 per click and you have a daily budget of $1,000, Google will stop showing your ad once 200 people click through to your site.

If your resources are limited, many experts advocate setting a lower CPC rather than a smaller daily budget, since its better to be shown at a lower position on search results pages for the whole day rather than at a higher position but for only a part of the day. There are also some studies that reveal that ads in lower positions tend to convert better and generate more sales.

Next week I’ll explain how to write ads for your PPC campaigns.