Setting up a Pay Per Click campaign – Part two.

So now we have the basic setup for our ad words campaign we need to start making some sense out of all the keywords and options that we have available.

It’s pretty easy to just do the Google keyword research and off you go. Indeed Google made it that way! It’s as simple as possible to start spending your advertising budget!

But before we do that lets think about what we really want from our PPC campaign.

Like all marketing spend it’s important to try and track whether your spend is producing results. With PPC this is very easy if you set it up correctly in the first place. In fact PPC is one of the most attractive marketing propositions that we have available because of its immediacy and the tracking and analysis tools that we have available.

When you compare PPC to something like an advert in yellow pages or a spot in your local rag there really is no competition. It’s very difficult to gauge marketing results from “on page” advertising and much of your budget goes to waste because of this. Once you have set up your PPC campaign properly from the outset you can begin to eliminate the waste and it becomes a very cost effective advertising medium.

So, down to the nitty gritty:

What we need to do is to separate our “keyword areas” into multiple container groups so that we can monitor the effectiveness of each “container”. In Google ad words each container is called an “ad group” and we use these ad groups to divide up our keywords.

Let’s use an example to illustrate how this works.

Margaret has a specialist curtain and blinds store for which she recently built a new ecommerce store. It’s brand new so she has no traffic yet and she’s using Google ad words for the first time.

Let’s divide up the products into the two obvious categories – Curtains and Blinds.

Now let’s examine the “Blinds” category in the first instance.

Take a look at how many different variations of blinds we have. Let’s take these three for starters:

“Conservatory blinds”

“Venetian blinds”

“Roller blinds”

Each of these categories now becomes an “ad group” under our Google ad words “campaign”. In the beginning we separate out our categories and create an ad words group for each category for several reasons:

Firstly, it’s easy to get an overview of which category (ad group) is producing the most activity.

Secondly we can design different “ad’s” that are relevant to each category.

So now let’s look at our first ad group – “conservatory blinds” and get the initial keyword list.

Using the Google keyword tool we get back 79 keyword possibilities ranging from “conservatory blinds”, “made to measure blinds”, “roller blinds” etc.

79 keywords in one “ad group” are much too many to work with so we will need to add some more niche categories. We could add a category for “conservatory roof blinds” for example and then add the relevant keywords to this ad group.

So now we add the relevant keywords to our ad group for “conservatory blinds”. Here’s a beginning list:

Conservatory blinds

Blinds for conservatories

Blinds in conservatories

Made to measure conservatory blinds

Keep adding your keywords until you have a workable list of around 20 keywords for each ad group.

Now, when you add your keywords to the ad group make sure you include a beginning and ending quotation mark “ “ around your keyword. This will ensure that your ad only gets displayed if the keyword gets typed in exactly as you have it. This is called “exact match” and is the best way for beginners to start with their PPC campaign because it offers the least scope to lose money!

So now we have our first category complete with our first keyword set of around twenty keywords.

The final task in our initial setup is to design an advert that will be displayed when our keyword phrase is matched on the Google search page.

Whatever you do, DO NOT copy what everyone else is doing. They are most likely way off the mark with their message and there is no point in copying other people’s mistakes.

ALWAYS run two ads or more at the same time for your ad group.

The first advert is your “control”. Remember when we set up the campaign in the first place we set the adverts to be “rotating evenly” this is so that we can measure the effectiveness of each advert we create.

When designing your advert think about what the customer is actually looking for. Don’t be tempted to create something bland:

See how all the ads look alike. You need to make your advert stand out and appeal to the searcher if you are going to get the clicks! For example you could try a headline of 0% interest free blinds (if you can offer that service) which would stand out a mile from all of the other bland offerings.

Here is a very important point to consider when you are designing your PPC campaign:

Google makes the clicks cheaper for the adverts that get clicked on the most. Yes you read that right. This is the way that they control the quality of the adverts that are displayed by pricing out irrelevant ads. So the closer you get to target your message properly the more clicks you get and guess what! Yep, the cheaper they become!

When designing your advert always keep in mind the following:

You are trying to solve someone’s problem. If someone is searching for something then they have a problem that needs to be solved. How can you help solve their problem?

Simply saying “conservatory blinds” is not going to help them much at all. They need to know something more. Your job is to find that “something more” that will induce the click.

By running two adverts alongside each other you can quickly see which advert is producing the highest click through rate (CTR) and therefore costing you the least money. After a short period you can ditch the under performing advert and rewrite it to try and outperform your existing “control” advert. You continue in this fashion continually improving your CTR and reducing your cost per click. Continually striving to produce the ultimate ‘ad and never getting there.

Repeat the dose for all of your other categories.

Yes it’s a lot of work! But it’s also the most cost effective way of doing the job. Once you start to see which keywords are producing the most clicks for the least amount of money then you can start to home in on specific keywords which are really working for you.

So now you have a basic PPC campaign up and running with everything neatly compartmentalised and at least two adverts running for each ad group. What’s next?

Well now you need to know if those keywords that are getting you all of that lovely traffic are actually converting into sales.

	Enter your search terms Submit search form
	Web www.StoreBuilder.co.uk