WSI Blog - Internet Marketing Tips and Strategies

Pay Per Click Marketing Tips:

Here are some quick Pay Per Click Marketing tips for you to consider when managing your own campaigns.

•  Set Goals - Determine the goal of your campaign (sales, leads, brand awareness)

•  Know your audience – allows you to narrow in on keywords, ad text, landing pages to avoid potential “roadblocks” in the conversion process.

•  Less is more! – don’t try to do too much with 1 campaign. Creating multiple, highly targeted campaigns with focused ad groups and keywords that align well with ad copy and landing pages, will improve your quality score, relevancy, conversion, and squeeze more out of your PPC budgets.

•  Geo Targeting – if your business is local, have your pay per click ads only display in a 10, 15, 25 mile radius of your office or primary market. If you are on a limited budget, the smaller the radius the better.

•  Content Networks – avoid content networks until you have a good feel for your campaigns. Test content networks in small increments to see what works and what doesn’t.

•  Keywords – find niche, long tail keywords that convert and you will get more from your budget. Spending time on keyword research is vital to your success. Review your keywords on a regular basis and search for more. What might work today, might not work tomorrow. Optimize, Optimize, Optimize!

•  Landing Pages – make sure the page you are sending your traffic aligns well with the keywords and ad copy. Investing in a good landing page with a well crafted PPC campaign can produce excellent results.

•  Analytics – study your analytics data and conversion goals. You need to know what is working and what is not producing results.

•  #1 Position Isn’t Always Better– businesses are obsessed with obtaining the #1 paid ad position in the search engines. Why? They believe that being #1 will produce the best results, but this is not necessarily true. It depends on the keywords, bidding strategy, landing page, and conversion results from various placements. A #3-5 position can generate better results with a well thought out campaign with a good landing page vs. a #1 position with poor keyword to ad alignment and a below average landing page. And it will cost you a lot less! That doesn’t mean we don’t see the value in a #1 position, if we can get there by achieving a good Quality Score, and good results for a reasonable investment.

Obviously, there is a lot more to PPC than what I can provide in a blog post, and to do it well is going to take a lot of time. If you are going to manage your own campaigns, you need to stay educated and up to speed with the industry changes. There are lots of great resources online and Google even offers some good educational tools to help learn more about PPC and how to manage a campaign.