If you are trying to get your website listed, it may feel like it takes forever. Luckily, you can use pay per click (PPC) advertising to make everything go a little bit quicker. With good PPC management services, you can have a campaign set up that doesn’t just get you more traffic, but that, in so doing, actually pays for itself!
How to Set Up a Campaign
The best thing to do is work with a PPC management company to set up your campaign. However, should that not be possible, perhaps because you don’t have a large enough budget yet, there are a few things you can do yourself. Setting up your campaign involves:
- Researching a keyword list, making one as big as possible but that only includes keywords that are actually relevant to you.
- Make themed groups for those keywords and keyword phrases. These groups are known as ‘ad groups’ and will really help you to get more out of your campaign.
- Make sure your ads contain the keyword in the headline, and make a minimum of two ads in each group that are essentially the same, changing a single thing in either the ad text or the headline.
- Use a dynamic keyword insertion to target your URL. This helps to increase your overall quality scores.
- Always include conversion tracking, so that you can see which ads work and which ones don’t.
Managing Your PPC Campaign
- First use exact match keywords. Only spend a little bit. This shows you which keywords work best.
- Have a negative keyword list, which means the advertiser will NOT show your ads for certain keywords. This is really useful to make sure you don’t pay for irrelevant traffic.
- Tweak how much you want to pay for the ads, so that you spend more on the ones that get you the most hits.
- Split test your ads by showing them evenly. Once you have more than 100 impressions, you pick the ad that works best and discard the others – or invest less in them if they also work well.
- Pause keywords that don’t get clicks after at least 1,000 impressions. Keeping poor keywords live will impact badly on your campaign.
The most important thing is that you keep doing your research. Some people find that PPC is like a natural extension of their regular work, others struggle significantly with it. Either way, it is a significant amount of work, even if you find it very easy. Hence, once your campaign starts paying for itself, or once your business gets off the ground and you have a bit more budget available, it is better to hire a company to manage things for you. They are professional and will spend all their attention on your keywords, making them work for you, and effectively giving you a return on investment.
Once your keywords work in order to improve your rankings and get you traffic, you need to start using them to monetize. This is even more complex, as you will have to calculate at which point you will actually make a profit.
