Pay-per-click, commonly referred to as PPC, is already a well established marketing strategy. Many of our clients utilize PPC campaigns to drive traffic to their site, resulting in increased revenue and a positive ROI. However, for those who are unfamiliar, incorporating it into your own marketing strategy can seem daunting. So, in this article we'll cover the basics and help you learn how to build your own PPC campaign.

What is PPC? Why should I be using it?

PPC is an Internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites.  Advertisers pay the hosting service whenever the ad is clicked.¹ Its considered one of the best online marketing channels for the following reasons:

• PPC yields a good return on investment
• PPC gives you instant targeted traffic
• PPC helps you identify effective/ineffective elements of your offerings, promotions, and/or website
• PPC provides exposure while helping you increase sales
• How to develop your own PPC campaign

Now that you're more familiar with what PPC is and why its a good idea, let's get into how to develop your own PPC campaign.

1. Content Review

Before you begin developing your PPC campaign, you'll need to define your goals, your target audience and the products/services you intend to market. Take a look through your web site. What keywords/phrases would be relevant to your campaign?

2. Campaign Structure

Now that you have a good sense of the category and products/services, you can begin to group content / keyword findings into general themes. This establishes the foundation of your campaign's structure and will help guide your keyword research. For example, if you have a roofing company, you may find the following themes:

• general roofing services
• roofing contractors
• roofing materials
• roofing design
• roofing systems
• roofing shingle

3. Keyword Generation

Put yourself in the mindset of your audience.  Think about what search terms they would use when looking to purchase a product or service that your website is offering.  Your goal here is to discover as many related terms, relevant keyword combinations, keyword variations, synonyms, and misspellings in order to multiply the number of your initial keywords in your inventory.

4.  Keyword Grouping   

By now, you should have long lists of keywords under each of your high level content areas.  The next thing you want to do is to split these keyword lists into specific ad groups.  Within each of these ad groups would be highly focused keywords in close relation to each other. Buliding off our previous example, below would be keywords for the ad group "roofing materials." 

• roofing materials
• roofing material prices
• metal roofing materials
• residential roofing materials
• rubber roofing materials
• green roofing materials

There's no such thing as too many ad groups.  There's no restriction as to how many ad groups you can create. This will vary depending on the complexity of your site and the size of the audience you are targeting.

5.  Implementation : Ad Copy Creation

Now that your ad groups and keywords are well defined, its time to develop ads that are relevant to those keywords and ad groups.  You might want to conduct a Google search on your targeted keywords and see how your competitors are showing their ads.  This is a good starting point as it will give you ideas on how to word your own ads.  Just make sure your ad copy is relevant to your keywords as much as possible.

For example, let's say you own Bob's Green Tea. You're writing an ad for your organic tea, aiming for keywords “organic tea”.

A Bad Paid Search Ad:
Bob’s Green Tea
Selling green tea since 1997
Come and see our full selection.
bobsgreentea.com

 A Good Paid Search Ad:
Bob’s Great Organic Tea
High quality, refreshing organic
tea products on sale today only.
bobsgreentea.com/organic

Your goal is to market your product better than your competitors. Som, it's good to be as descriptive you can without losing focus on your keyword: “organic”.  This increases your ad's relevance.

6. Landing Page

The last step in your ad copy development is landing page designation.  Here you will choose where you are going to display your ads which includes your display URL(the URL that will show your ad copy) and destination URL(the destination URL where the ad will drive to). On the site, find the page that is most relevant to your group's keywords.

  The landing page needs to:

• Effectively communicate the product or service you’re trying to engage users
• Make it easy to take the required action or business goal with as few clicks as possible
• Contain original content relating to the product or service
• Load fast - page load time is a factor in determining your quality score and ad rank

There you have it. You're now ready to start building your own campaigns and implementing PPC into your overall marketing strategy. Have questions about PPC or SEO? Visit our contact page and get in touch.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_per_click