How To Create An Effective Adwords (PPC) Campaign
Professional PPC Management Services Made Easy
If you’re a big fan of instant gratification then PPC marketing is the way to go for your internet marketing. Even though SEO is very powerful, it takes a very long time (depending on your industry) to see the return on your investment or ROI. PPC or (pay per click) marketing starts putting money in your pocket right away. This of course is assuming you have hired the right PPC manager to run your campaign. If you don’t have an extremely experienced PPC campaign manager then your cost per conversion could be so great that your’e just spinning your tires, or worse, lose money. I’m going to show you how to set up a new PPC campaign from scratch. I’ll show you how to set up ad copies and how to create a sound adgroup/campaign structure. I will also be explaining how to use the third party tool Semrush to find keyword ideas. After reading this blog you will have to tools necessary to run your own campaign. Once your campaign takes off, it won’t be long before you are over whelmed with data and you will need to consider hiring a professional PPC management company to give you a hand.
Adwords Campaign Management & Creation
The first thing you need to do in order to set up a Google Adwords campaign is to create a Gmail account. then go to https://adwords.google.com. Enter your email address and your websites URL. You will now be brought to a page allowing you to set your budget, targeted location, Networks, keywords, bids, and write your text ads. I will first discuss “Your budget”, this is the maximum amount of money you would like to spend per day. Since we are starting a new campaign we do not want to have a very high budget simply because we have no data to help point us in the right direction yet. So pick a small number, but understand that this number needs to be relative to the industry. Sometime cost per click or (CPC) is very high, like in the emergency water restoration industry CPC is around $80 for a popular keyword so keep that in mind. You can get a good idea about what your average cost per click will be by using third party tools like SEMrush which I will go through when we discuss keyword selection. Now you need to choose your target audience, “Location”. Here you can choose to have your add visible to a very broad audience like ” All countries and territories” or as pin pointed as a zip code or even within the radius of a specific address.
Choosing Networks
Choosing what “Networks” you would like to use is the next step. You can choose to have your ads displayed on Google’s Search Network, Display network, or both. Google’s Search Network includes Google search sites and non-Google sites that use Google as a search engine. These ads are targeted based on keywords users select as their search query. This network only allows you to run text ads. The traffic that comes from this network generally has a much higher conversion rate then Display Networks so cost per CPC is higher as well. Display Network includes Google content sites and non-Google content partners that show ads (YouTube for example). Although the display network reaches more people the quality of traffic is much lower and is generally used to promoted the brand name of a product or service. Rather than being driven by specific keywords, display network ads appear based on themes in the keyword list. Additionally, it’s possible to run text ads as well as image, video or rich media ads on the display network. I recommend just using Google’s search network to ensure your budget stays under control.
Creating An Ad group
For keyword selection Adwords will provide some suggestions and show each keywords popularity. For this step I find SEMrush the be the most helpful when searching for keyword ideas. Login to your account at http://www.semrush.com. I found that the best keywords to use are the ones that the your top ranking competitors are using. Place your competitors URLs in SEMrush’s search bar and all the organic keywords they rank for will come up. This program will show you what position they are in for that keyword, the number of searches that keywords receives, and the average cost you would pay per click for the keyword. I would collect the best keyword ideas from at least 3 top ranking competitors then select the prim keywords from that group. Your keywords should be selected based on you budget, choosing the keyword with the highest CPC might exhaust your budget to soon. You want to pick a good ratio of quantity (Volume) to Quality (CPC). These keywords need to be closely related and described by your ad copy, which I will go through later. Once you have 20 keywords add them to the keyword list in place of the ones Adwords has suggested.
Bidding
One of the most important steps in setting up a PPC campaign is setting your bid. There are 2 ways to do this, manual and automatic bidding. A lot of very experienced PPC managers who manage very large and complex PPC campaigns will usually choose to manually bid or use some kind proprietary biding platform. This will place bids automatically but gives much greater control over your budget. If this is your first campaign I recommend using the automatic bidding until you become more familiar with Adwords. This will let you set a daily budget for your campaign and Adwords will automatically adjust the max CPC to bring in the most clicks possible within you budget.
Ad Copies
When creating your ad copies the rule of thumb is to write one extremely targeted ad that has one purpose and expresses a single intent. You need to ask your self is the ad relevant to your product , relevant to the searchers intent, and does it correspond with your landing page. Your ad should state what makes your business, product, or offer unique. Your ad should Include prices, promotions, and a call to action. Split testing should also be done. This is when a second ad copy is created for the same ad group but is different in that it may include a different promotion, call to action, or selling point. This way you can measure the difference in performance between the two and get a better understanding ofHiring A Good PPC Management Company
The contents of this blog is more than enough to make you successful with simple PPC marketing however, for those of you looking to start a large eCommerce campaign this may not work for you. Keep in mind that the more successful the PPC campaign becomes the more it will grow and that means you are going to spend a lot of time analyzing data and tweaking your campaign to make it more effective as your scale up your aggressiveness. Sometimes, it makes sense to outsource the management of your Adwords campaign to a company that is professional and that can grow with you like The Miami SEO Company. We are a data driven PPC management company that can take your campaign to the next level!
The DIY Option: Online Adwords Training Courses For Beginners
For those of you who would like to get more information on how to use Google Adwords effectively, there are tons of online ppc learning courses that are very effective. The best Adwords learning course that I’ve found online so far is listed on Udemy and is very affordable. There are many others to choose from on various learning sites but that is one I took and enjoyed. If you have a small business and want to learn how to setup adwords for your business quickly, without having to pay an agency this may be a good option for you.
About The Author
Jason Hawkins / http://www.themiamiseocompany.com
Jason Hawkins is the CEO & Co-Founder of The Miami SEO Company. He has over ten years of experience in search engine optimization, conversion rate optimization and lead generation. His core responsibilities include identifying ways to increase value of services rendered, training staff on advanced SEO topics, and A/B testing internal processes to consistently improve client return on investment.
