We have seen it time and time again…
These days business owners know that they need to be online. When someone here’s about your business, the first thing they do is look at your website. These days a business website is standard practice.
So you have a business, you have a new website, and you’re ready to market. What’s the first thing you do? I know! Buy traffic through pay per click!
Time out!
Yes… pay per click is an extremely effective marketing tool. However, it must be handled with care. Blindly dumping money into a pay per click budget will be disastrous. There must be a plan of action. Pay per click money goes fast. Very fast, and having a plan is huge.
Building a Successful Pay Per Click Campaign
There are a few key notes when designing a pay per click campaign. First and foremost, you need to allocate your goals. You must research your market and learn what the cost per click for certain keywords will be. You need to decide what you want this traffic to do, and you need to convince the traffic to perform an action. Finally, you need to track your data so that you can analyze and adjust. Let’s get right to it.
For the purpose of demonstration, we are going to pretend that we are building a Pay Per Click Campaign for our Personal Trainer Business.
Determining your Cost Per Click
The best way to do this is through Googles Keyword Planner, which links through to your MCC. The first step is simple. Do research. Get keyword ideas. Find out how much certain keywords will cost. Cross that by the how much traffic a keyword gets. Take these numbers and fix them into your budget to start getting some ideas on how much traffic you can afford for what keywords and what the traffic numbers will be like. Research! Research! Research! No detail is too small!
Your keyword planner will look something like this. If you want to get advances you can use the keyword planner to help build your campaign.
Setting up Your Campaign
Campaigns are broken down into two sections. Ad Groups and Ad Words. Ad Groups are simply a way to categorize keywords. It works best to keep keywords you are bidding on organized through Ad Groups. Think of it as files and papers. Ad Groups are files.
Here’s an example that may help –
As seen above, let’s say we are trying to earn clients in a personal training business. We may want to group the Ad Words into categories such as “yoga”, or “weight training” or “even diet.” It is completely up to you how you want to group your Ad Words.
Ad Words are they actual ads themselves. A standard PPC ad can be seen on almost every Google search result page. When building your Ad Words you will need to build the link text, the snippet of into, and of course, the URL that the link will go to. This brings us to the next step which is building a landing page. The proper landing page is essential in converting your traffic.
Here’s a quick example of what our personal trainer ad could look like.
Creating a Landing Page
The biggest mistake people make is driving all of their Pay per Click to the home page. When you do this, you assume the user is going to take the time to surf around your website and search for what it is they are looking for. A rule of thumb is that you have 3 seconds.
Three seconds! That’s it. That’s all the time you have until the user decides whether the page he or she landed on is providing them with the information they are looking for. If someone searches “how can a personal trainer help me with my diet?” – and they land on the homepage that is mostly about lifting and exercise, then you will fail to convert that traffic and you are wasting money.
The importance of designing a proper landing page can not be understated. If you are buying traffic, you must convert that traffic somehow. The definition of what a “conversion” is may change from case to case, but 90% of the time, conversion means revenue. If you are spending money on PPC, and you are not converting the traffic, you are wasting money. Simple as that. Designing effective and intentional landing pages is worth every penny, and is crucial in the buying process.
Quality Score – Analyze and Improve
The PPC process never ends. It is a constant tweaking and improving. There may be long periods when you find a sweet spot and your cost per click is low and your traffic is converting and that is great. Just keep in mind that search behavior is always shifting and moving, so you need to keep an eye out for new openings and trends in whatever industry you are in.
Understanding Your Quality Score
Your quality score measures the relevance of your ad in relation to the search term. Your score is determined by a couple different factors. Maintaining a high-quality score affects your positioning, your cost per click and ultimately your conversion, it’s important to understand this.
Track, Analyze and Improve Your Ads
Now that we have built a great ad campaign, you are starting to generate leads and phone calls as a result. Dig deep. Which ads a creating phone calls? Is it worth putting more money into those ads? Are any ads failing completely? Can you improve the landing pages or is it worth it to just scratch an ad all together?
When it is all said and done, PPC is an extremely effective marketing tool. Keep in mind, that PPC is just one option in a multitude of options that can drive traffic to your site and increase revenue.
