PPC - you gets what you pays for

PPC Strategy - Phase 1: Initial Planning

In order to decide how you are going to run your PPC campaign, you need to consider the following:

The Traditional Stuff Applies!

Like every other online marketing exercise, you need a full online and an offline analysis of the business, customer demographics, the industry and competitors. You need a brand, an identity and of course a clear unique selling point.

Define Your Goal

The PPC golden rule: What do you want to achieve with your PPC campaign? Would you like to increase awareness of your site, or are you looking to attract more traffic? In most cases PPC adverts are focused on delivering conversions in the form of filling in an enquiry form or purchasing a product.

If you are looking to make money from PPC (isn't everyone?); do you want the best return on investment (ROI) or do you want more net profit (more conversions can be achieved with a lower ROI which will still result in an overall net profit increase)?

It is important to make sure you have one very clearly defined goal from PPC. It is not possible to always be seen in the top position for the important keywords (branding) and to achieve a good ROI at the same time.

How Does PPC Fit Into The Rest Of Your Online Strategy?

There are many different views on how PPC and SEO can work together and there are definite benefits in using the lessons learnt in one for the other.

PPC Strategy - Phase 2: Running the Campaign

Once you have addressed the above, you can choose how to run your PPC campaign considering all of the following elements:

Campaign structure, which ensures your budget and stats are correctly focussed (i.e. according to different products and brands or maybe according to different geographic markets)
Keyword selection, which should contain the right balance of cost and relevance and should be considered alongside your SEO keyword selection
Ad wording, which needs to communicate to the right market and contain as much detail about what you are offering in as few characters as possible
Landing pages, which leave the customer with no doubt in their mind that they have found what they were looking for
Tracking, which involves deciding what customer behaviour is important to you. This obviously includes the campaign goal (which defines the campaign profitability), but what else can you track to give you interesting insight into your customer? You've paid for the click - even if the person exits your site without converting, you can get value out of knowing why

PPC Strategy - Phase 3: Testing and Optimising

Once you have set up your campaign and tracking, your PPC strategy moves into the vital testing and optimising phase.

Keyword Management

Identify your priority keywords (the ones that convert best) as the ones to spend budget and time on. Take a second look at the keywords that don't convert - there could be a simple reason why - perhaps you haven't explained yourself properly in the advert or the landing page or maybe you need to ensure your advert is only showing for relevant searches through keyword matching.

Advert Management

Make sure you test your adverts. Test tone, wording and structure, offer details and display URLS. It is important to test both click-through rate and conversion rate as they both affect your campaign performance and it is a good way to see if you are meeting the customer expectations created by the advert.

Landing Page Management

The smallest change in a landing page can make a big difference to the profitability of your campaign. There are many important rules about landing page design (which is another topic in itself) including these important points:

Build a landing page specifically designed to what the person has searched for
Make sure you cover all the information a customer might ask for - speak to the sales team for this kind of information
Use SEO - add some relevant content etc. This especially benefits you in Google
Keep testing changes - use split tests if you have enough traffic

This can keep going right down to the font and colours you choose to use but the most important bit of advice would be (a traditional marketing tip) look through your customers eyes. If you can't shake yourself from the technicalities of brilliant design ask a very honest person (similar to your customer in demographics) to look at the landing page for you.

Campaign Management

PPC keyword research can offer great insight in finding new ways to package or market your product. For example, if you run a guest house in Cape Town, you should see through your keyword research that many people are looking for honeymoons in Cape Town and so could put a nice romantic honeymoon package together for them and thus expending your product.

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