Why is PPC advertising so popular?
Getting organic rankings for your business keywords isn’t exactly easy. It takes time and effort. PPC, on the other hand, is one of the easiest and quickest ways to put advertisements in front of targeted audiences searching about something related to your business. If you do it right, that is.
Here’s what you need to know about PPC Advertising for Beginners.
How PPC Advertising Works
PPC advertisers have a list of keywords that users search on. Businesses set bid prices in a real-time auction to decide how much they will pay the PPC advertiser for each time someone clicks on an ad.
The PPC channel decides who gets displayed higher, based on the amount that was bid and the quality of the ad and the page you link to the ad (the landing page.) When your ad is clicked, the PPC channel gets paid.
The key points of managing a PPC campaign are budget, proper targeting, and understanding conversion analytics.
1. Budget
All businesses using PPC must set a daily budget. To start, figure out how well your site is converting right now. Your analytics software should tell you that. Just divide conversions by the number of visitors.
Then compare the cost per keyword you want to target.
Let’s say it costs you $1 per click, and your site converts at 2%. Budgeting $1000 would pay for 1000 clicks, of which 20 would theoretically convert. You can then track how many clicks you get per day until the money runs out. This sets a baseline for future improvements and a daily ad budget for future campaigns.
2. Proper Targeting
Think of keyword targeting as putting up ads in the Yellow Pages.
A good ad will place you under the right headings, and your entries will be in the books for the right regions.
After selecting related keywords for your business, the most important thing is to geo-target your ads. This is like getting your ad in the right book. If you own a local business in New York, you wouldn’t want your ads to appear in front of people in LA. Thankfully, both Google and Bing now have sophisticated geo-targeting tools built into their PPC Advertising applications.
If you have a complicated business that serves many interests, you can create groups of keywords and design ad groups that target those interest groups. For instance, if you were a plumber you may want one set of ads targeting emergencies and another set of ads that target new installations.
3. Conversion Analytics
All PPC Advertising is designed to do one thing, get the right visitors to your landing page. All PPC marketers must understand how to read analytics to know why a PPC campaign is succeeding or failing.
If you’re getting a lot of clicks, but not enough conversions, there could be two problems:
- Your targeting is not right, and you are getting unrelated impressions and clicks.
- Your landing page isn’t optimized well for conversions.
What can you do to take care of unrelated clicks?
- Mark negative keywords (this will make sure that your ad doesn’t show for the terms that you mark as negative)
- Use less broad matched keywords, and more of BMM, phrase and exact keywords. (You can read more about keyword match types here.)
Bonus: You can get more tips here on getting related impressions.
What can you do in case of low landing page conversions?
This is the time to use A/B testing on your landing pages to make small improvements to raise the conversions.
- Check the loading time of your page
- Remove any fields from the form that you don’t really need
- Make sure that the landing page content matches the ad content. This is one of the biggest reasons for low landing page conversions.
There are several other things that you can test, and mistakes that you can avoid. This article would help you get rid of some of the most common PPC landing page mistakes.
Bonus: Display Advertising
If you are running display campaigns, and no one is clicking your ads and you know you’re paying enough to get a good display placement, then you may need to A/B test the ads themselves and leave the landing page alone.
This is a very high-level overview of Google Adwords to help beginners get started. I hope you this PPC Advertising for Beginners guide helped you. If you are ready to start running PPC ads now, this Google adwords guide would help you out.
