PPC 101: A Beginner’s Guide to the Dos and Don’ts of PPC
· BlueHat Marketing
When done right, PPC can deliver immediate returns by giving your company a fast track to the top of the SERP. But when done wrong, you can waste your budget on fruitless traffic. Follow these dos and don’ts to ensure you get the maximum return on your dollars.
Paid search advertising is a great way for companies to expand their reach and accelerate business growth. Unlike organic, which takes a concerted effort and sometime fighting through competition to come out on top, pay-per-click advertising (PPC) gives you an immediate chance to bring in high-quality, buy-ready traffic.
Balancing between the art of crafting converting copy and the science of defining your target audience is tricky, but with these beginner tips, you’ll be well on the way to growing your traffic exponentially.
Be sure to follow the rules closely. Skipping a step could result in disaster down the road.
- Define a budget and start small: There’s no hard and fast percentage of your budget that you should start with. The only thing you need to know is that you shouldn’t throw all of your dollars in right away. Start with a smaller percentage and increase as you see better results. Why not start with, say, 10% and see what happens. Focus on a specific audience and run a tester campaign.
- Set clear goals: Do you want to expand your reach, increase traffic, or generate conversions? Knowing what you’re working toward will pave the road to honing down your audience (read: making more money and spending less). For example, if your business requires a customer to fill in a qualification form before receiving a free quote and your goal is to increase conversions, then your first goal needs to be landing a visitor on that form’s page.
- Research your competition: Competitor research is vital to finding the most conversion-rich keywords. See which keywords they are bidding on and do your best to uncover inefficiencies (are they bidding for keywords that aren’t converting for you?). As always, you want high volume and low competition. Experiment with as many different long-tail keywords as possible.
The Don’ts
The downside to PPC is that you pay each time a visitor clicks your ad, and if your ads aren’t done properly, you will waste money on traffic that won’t convert. Avoid these key pitfalls and save your marketing budget:
- Sending Visitors to a Random Page: The page your visitor lands on (the “landing page”) should always match the ad shown. Do not send them simply to your homepage.
- Forgetting Negative Keywords: Negative keywords will prevent your ad from showing to disinterested traffic; for example, if you are a divorce attorney, a negative keyword would be “criminal defence”, so that your ads never show to those searching for criminal defence attorneys.
- Not Split Testing: Split testing allows you to test two different iterations of the same ad against each other to which one performs best. Use it. Changing one word resulted in a 77% increase in conversions for a company.
Follow these dos and don’ts to maximize your conversions and minimize your budget waste. If a professionally managed PPC campaign from Google-certified experts sounds like something your company is interested in, let the SEM team at BlueHat Marketing know today.
