How to Get Started With PPC Advertising

By Kelly K. Morgan

Pay per click advertising methods are becoming increasingly attractive to many companies that want to promote their business on the Internet. Instead of relying solely on traffic from organic search results, pay per click advertising platforms such as Google Adwords can help your company achieve prominent placement on the search engine.

You may have to spend a considerable amount for PPC, but you can get a significant ROI, if you do things right. Here are 5 steps to help you launch your PPC 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: Choose your keywords. There are many free online tools that you can use to discover the most relevant keywords for your market. Keywords are the backbone of every pay per click campaigns. Selecting the wrong keywords can be disastrous to your campaign so you need to spend some time to make sure that you get the right keywords. Aside from keyword research, you may have to do A - B split tests to select a winning list of keywords.

Step 4: Monitor the results of your campaign. Pay per click programs can generate click through and traffic reports easily allowing you to optimize your campaign further. Reports will typically include the number of clicks for a certain keyword, the GEO locations of those who clicked, and you can even match the reports to your analytics program to see which keywords resulted in a conversion or sale.

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. - 33377

About the Author:

Sign Up for our Free Newsletter

Enter email address here