Top 10 tips for PPC

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is a great way to get your products or services in front of targeted prospects via search engine searches. As more and more advertisers convert to search engine marketing as a way of driving business, how do you ensure you stay one step ahead of the game? 

1.   Get the look of your advert right – use keywords in your PPC text, Capitalise Every Word – Google Do Not Allow All The Text To Be CAPITALISED, But It Will Still Standout If You Do The First Letter Of Every Word, make sure the spelling and grammar are correct, use emotive words like “want” or “need”. Above all remember this is an advert and although you are restricted in the word and character count, you have to use what words that will ultimately drive traffic.

2.   Run test adverts – It is important to test your adverts in SEM to see what works for your market. Create a series of 3 or 4 adverts with various words and phrases to run small tests through the PPC dashboard. Adverts can easily be paused if others are doing better.

3.   Monitor adverts – As with a traditional marketing campaign, monitor the response you are getting with SEM and of course, monitor the amount of money that you are spending on each campaign. While bid amounts can be set up automatically, by keeping a close eye on the results you can quickly react and change your PPC if necessary.

4.   Position of advert – Strangely, adverts on position three or four do better than on position one. This is because adverts that appear top of the search get a lot of browsers or junk clicks. If you can get your advert to third or fourth position it is likely you will get more actual buyers through to your site.

5.   Target audience – Again, as with traditional marketing so with PPC. Make sure that you target – via location, via search term – who you want to click on your advert. Use your monitoring, sales capture and analytics techniques to further hone your audience targeting.

6.   Look at competitors – First rule of internet marketing, copy the other kids’ homework. Put your key search terms into Google, Yahoo and Bing and see what your competitors have written on their PPC advertising. If it works for them, it may well work for you!

7.   Call to action – Inevitably your URL is your call to action, make sure it is live and in your PPC advert text. 

8.   Corresponding landing page – further to that, if you want to optimise your site for sales make sure that the landing page for your PPC correlates to your keyword. It reassures visitors if they go straight through to the information they were expecting in the first instance.

9.   Bid right – The most popular terms become more expensive, sometimes using plurals can help you scrap good traffic at lower bid rates. I.E. Marketer vs. Marketers.

10.  Always strive to make it better – PPC is not something you set up in one go and then leave. You have to constantly return to ensure that you are getting value for money from SEM. Set some time aside each month to do this.  

Using PPC is not a black art as some would have you believe; with a little bit of technical knowledge and the key principles of marketing you can create effective SEM campaigns.