Pay Per Click advertising or PPC is a great way of driving traffic to your website. However, if not managed properly PPC can become costly and ineffective. A lot goes into building a winning PPC campaign from researching and selecting the keywords to setting up PPC landing pages that are optimised for conversions.
What is Pay Per Click Advertising?
PPC is a model of internet marketing in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. Essentially, it’s a way of buying visits to your site, rather than attempting to earn those visits organically.
Search engine advertising is one of the most popular forms of PPC. It allows advertisers to bid for ad placement in a search engine’s sponsored links when someone searches on a keyword that is related to their business offering.
Our guide to the best pay per click practices will help you understand how to manage your PPC campaigns and boost your results.
Do your campaign settings match your campaign strategy and goals?
Goal setting is a crucial first step for any PPC campaign. Keep goals in mind as you plan your campaigns, and make sure that your settings match them. An awareness campaign, for example, should have a broad reach, while a strict conversion-focused campaign may have constraints to maximize conversions.
Have you separated search and display campaigns?
This is a basic best practice, and yet it’s still not unusual to see search and display in the same campaign. It is always worth checking as it is Google’s default to group search and display campaigns.
Have you configured ad rotation?
Both Google and Bing offer the option to optimise for clicks, or to rotate ads more evenly. Ultimately this decision should be based on your campaign goals. If your goal is conversions, then even rotation makes sense; if your goal is traffic generation, then optimising for clicks is the better suited.
Have you set correct geographic locations?
This seems like a fairly simple task, but you would be surprised how many PPC campaigns are set up incorrectly. If your service or products are only available to a small local area, ensure your target geographic locations reflect this. For example a restaurant in Redditch would target surrounding areas where potential customers are likely to live, not the whole of the UK.
What about your campaign budget?
The rule of thumb for campaign budgets is to set them to an amount you’re comfortable spending. This varies across advertisers for some it could be £10 per day and others could be allocating £1000 per day. Google’s shared budgets option allows advertisers to set one budget across multiple campaigns, thereby reducing the amount of daily budget tweaking that many PPC managers previously had to perform.
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