A Beginners Guide to PPC Ad Campaign

Don’t you deserve the attention of your prospective buyers? Obviously, you do! The Pay-Per-Click Ad campaign is exactly for people like you, who are willing to grab the attention of their prospective customers but do not have the required technical skills or the patience to wait for their website to rank organically on search engines. You can find the ways to target PPC ad campaign effectively and leverage its full benefits explained on this page. 

Read on to know more about PPC ads and how much budget you need to run them.

What exactly is PPC?
As the name suggests PPC is the ad campaign where advertiser needs to pay only when a viewer clicks on the advertisement. This is one of the fairest methods of advertising because you do not pay only for displaying your ad; you pay when someone takes an action based on the displayed advertisements. Although Google AdWord is the most popular PPC ad campaign, there are some other campaigns too.

How much budget do you need for a PPC ad campaign?
You might have guessed by now that PPC does not require a fixed amount of budget because it will vary with the number of clicks. But, it is only one side of the coin. The rate you pay per click is not fixed either. The PPC ads are basically based on keywords and different keywords have different values. The value of keywords varies with the number of advertisers bidding for the keyword; more the advertisers more would be the Cost-Per-Click (CPC). 

But, it does not mean you cannot have a fixed budget for your advertising campaign. There are some PPC ad campaign providers who offer the option of setting a fixed budget. Suppose you set your limit to 50$ per day then your advertisement will be switched off once your Cost for the clicks reaches the 50$ mark for the day.

How to start your PPC ad campaign?
After knowing the basics of PPC you certainly would like to know how you would approach a PPC ad campaign for attracting profits to your business. So, here is the step by step guide to help you start your PPC campaign. We are proceeding with an assumption that you’ll be opting Google AdWords (for obvious reason) as the platform for PPC Ad Campaign.

• Choose Target Keyword – The first and perhaps the most important thing for your PPC ad campaign will be your keyword. Your ad will be linked to your keyword and will be displayed by Google to the searchers who search for that particular keyword. Make sure that you choose the keyword that your target audience will be searching if they need your product or service. You can take help of an SEO expert to come up with the keyword most relevant to your business, your advertisement, your landing page and your prospective customers.
• Create a call-to-action – You’ll need to give a clear call-to-action to your audience about whatever you wish them to do, once they click your paid ad. Do you wish them to buy your product? Write clearly in your ad text to ‘click to buy xyz product’. If you wish them to make a call to you for knowing more about your services; write that clearly. Your target audience needs to be guided with call-to-action.
• Set URL tracking for your paid search – Any advertisement campaign is of no use if you don’t know its effect on your business. So, you need to ensure that you can track URL for your paid search, even before you launch your campaign. Tracking the campaign metrics and analyzing the outcome will give you an insight into the performance of your keywords. You’ll be able to know which keyword needs to be paused and which keyword deserves a higher share of your campaign budget.
• Keep the ad campaign simple and manageable – You’ll need to manage your ad campaign on daily basis, so make sure you do not unnecessarily complicate the campaign. Create tightly themed small ad groups with relevant keywords and ensure each keyword is making sense in your ad text. You might need the help from an expert to design your ad text for the first time. Keep your campaign structure intuitive so that you can monitor the results effectively.

Customize your Google AdWords Setting – You won’t find any difficulty in setting your Google Adwords account because just like all other Google services, AdWords is very user-friendly. But, it does not mean that you’ll brainlessly go on clicking next, agree and done. When you use Google AdWords, by default you opt for the full Google network consisting Google.com and the entire partner sites like AOL.com, Ask.com and Display Network Site. When you are starting with a constrained budget it is considered best to opt out of the Google Display Network or your budget will be depleted very fast, robbing you of your chances to be visible on google.com and gaining converting leads. In addition to this, you should also customize your account language and the Location Targeting if you serve on a local level. By default, the Google Adwords show your advertisement nationwide which would not be of any use to you if you serve in a small geographic location.   

Keep Revisiting Your Ad Campaign Strategy
Starting a PPC Ad campaign and setting a budget is not enough if you want to utilize your advertising investment effectively. You’ll need to revisit and keep refining your strategies. Obviously, you do not only want to launch an Ad campaign but you want it to bring success to your business.