#1. Have a Goal
Measurable goals are crucial to Pay Per Click advertising, whether it’s sales, leads or branding. This includes having a good plan to map out how you’ll get to your goals and have room for needing to make any adjustments along the way.
#2. Add Negative Keywords
Let’s discuss first what this means. Search terms you don’t want your ads to show for, are negative words. They help keep your budget on track by optimizing your return on investment (ROI), and also acting like a security guard for your ad campaign (helping you not spend money where you don’t need to).
If you are a shoe company, but you don’t carry dress shoes for instance, you would want to include ‘dress shoes’ as a negative keyword. This means if someone searches for dress shoes, your advertisement will not show (saving you money).
#3. Campaign Structure
Before you launch a campaign, you will want to structure by making themes. Themes for your campaign helps you measure and manage your relevance to your target audiences.
For ease of use, you want to structure the campaigns in a similar way to the layout of your website. Create a campaign for each of the main categories of your products or services. Then ad specificity to the products or services in ad groupings.
#4. Measure Results
How do you figure out if your strategy is working out if you don’t have a way to measure performance? Google Analytics offer free tools to track results. Be sure to take the lessons you learn and apply the adjustments you need to make the campaign successful.
#5. Home Page and Landing Page
Make sure that your home page is not used as the landing page when someone clicks an ad from your advertising campaigns. For instance, let’s say someone is searching for “basement water extraction” service. If you set the landing page appropriately, when they click the ad, it should bring up the page of your website mentioning your “water extraction” services in detail. Otherwise they may land on your homepage which doesn’t show what they’re looking for.
#6. Targeting
Of course, you do need your ads to be specified to devices, language, and location. You don’t want your advertising to reach the wrong people, so save time and money by advertising the right way using the options available.
Here are some options to choose from. Don’t limit yourself to one language if you have business from multiple countries. Also, there are a multitude of devices being used that you can target, as well as multiple types of location settings. You can choose countries, regions, cities, or radius. Targeting is a tool you want in your tool kit.
#7. Homework
Doing your homework should be geared towards understanding your target audience, their online behavior, and what channels their active in. Then you will be able to reach your audience with message they can understand.
You might ask “how do you understand your audience?” To do this use keyword research tools. Most of the major search engines offer similar tools, like Google Keyword Planner. It’s free to advertisers, and allows you to find things like search volume and keyword competition levels.
First start with keyword terms you use to describe products or services. Then, move onto keywords for competitors or industry keywords. To be able to measure your audience is active with such search words, look at the search volume. This is a good indicator for key word effectiveness.
#8. Call to Action
This is a common mistake, not bringing your content to convert through a call to action on your landing page and ads. Use your imagination in testing different calls to actions in order to determine whether or not the message will generate results. Keep in mind, Google does have restrictions on some calls to action.
#9. Test, test and test
Once you have built your plan and you want to start executing, first test and refine it for best results. There are many changes you can make like time of day, target location, bidding and landing page, messages, and keywords among other things. This is the make or break it tip, testing all these elements and making appropriate changes.
You can use experiments as such in Google Analytics, allowing you to test certain elements you pick and choose simultaneously. Google Analytics Experiments allows you to test out two or more different landing pages by splitting up testing to determine which one performs best.
I would be glad to help you utilize PPC in creating high conversion ads with maximum ROI for your business.
Call or email Sonny at sonny@sonnyahuja.com for pricing.