How to set up your first Pay per click campaign
Diving into your first Google Adwords PPC campaign can be a bit daunting. If you are a new brand or a company that is just starting out on your pay per click strategy, these are a few ideas that can help you set up your PPC campaign for success in the short term and long haul.
Understand Your Competitors in Pay Per Click
This is important. Not only do you need to understand your competitors in your market that are direct business competitors, but you need to consider sites that may be targeting your keywords as a way to capture more broad traffic. Your online competitors are not the same businesses as you see when you look at a list of companies doing the same services as you do locally. Take a look at the keywords that you want to target and see whom is bidding on your keywords – take your research even further and click a few ads to see what the landing pages for those ads look like. You may be able to learn how your competitors are collecting leads.
Plan your PPC campaign around your business
This sounds simple but start with a spreadsheet and map out your different areas of business, the features of your products, brands that you sell or represent, locations that you service, seasonality factors, and other important defining aspects of your business. You’ll notice quickly that some areas start to group up nicely, these will become your campaigns or ad groups. If you have overlap, these are areas where you need to decide if you will close them off from each other or allow overlap to determine which ad group performs best. Notice that we haven’t even talked about keywords yet – this is because it’s important to know what your business is about first – and this helps us determine how people will be searching for your business. If you are a start up business, you may need to get creative with the type of keywords that you target – your market may not yet know how to search for the product or service that you provide – think about the problem that you are solving.
Keywords, Phrases and location targeting in PPC
Remember that keywords come in 3 main sizes – Broad match, Phrase match, and Exact match – each with different search volumes and user intent. When you start looking at keyword volumes, you may find that some keywords don’t have a lot of search interest, but those keywords may in fact be phrases that are very highly targeted and the searcher is ready to buy. Don’s shy away from very long tail keywords just because they have 10 or 20 searches per month. Location and devices matter a lot in PPC. With Google’s location targeting you are able to target people that are searching IN the location that you define or you can target people that show an interest within a geographic region. This can be important; for instance, in the senior care industry, pay per click strategy relies heavily on people searching for senior care solutions in a geographic region where their grandparents or parents live. We have to make that clear distinction and not exclude searches outside of our area.
With these 3 ideas, you should be able to get started in building the foundation for your PPC campaign. Contact us if you are interested in our Pay Per Click management and account build out services.