Planning and setting up a campaign in PPC Advertising

 1. Do your homework
For a successful campaign, you need a full online and an offline analysis of the business, customer demographics, the industry and competitors. While it is relatively quick to set up a campaign, pre-planning will show dividends later! You need a brand, an identity and a clear unique selling point. You only get 3 lines to advertise, you need to make sure you know what should be in there!

2. Define your goals
You need to know what you want to achieve with your PPC campaign. Branding campaigns, for example, are very different to campaigns that increase sales. What do you want users to do once they click on your advert?

3. Budget, CPA and targets
Determine how much you are willing to spend to achieve your goal – your target CPA.
Decide how much budget you are going to allocate to your PPC campaign. If your goal is to increase revenue, your budget might be unlimited so long as revenue is increasing and you are within your target CPA.

4. Keyword research
You need to determine what keywords potential customers are likely to use when searching for the service that you offer. Along with that, you need to know:

• What common misspellings a customer might use
• What words would show that they are not likely to purchase from you (words like free and cheap)

As part of your keyword research, you need to look at expected volumes for your keywords, so you know how to bid on keywords. See Tools of the Trade for some suggestions.

There are also tools which will show you similar or related keywords, so you can expand your keyword list even further. Again, find suggestions in Tools of the Trade.

5. Write the adverts
Using your keyword research, write compelling adverts to promote your products.
Adverts can be unique to a keyword, or you can group them and have a number of keywords for one advert.

Make sure you use an appropriate display URL, and that you target the landing page for each advert. Always include a call to action.

6. Place your bids
Based on your goals and keyword research, set the maximum bids for your keywords.
Don’t set these too high at this stage – you’ll tweak the bids as you test your campaign.

7. Measure, analyse, test, optimise!
With conversion tracking in place, you can analyse your ROI down to a keyword level, and then focus on those keywords which are converting best.

Consider seeing how changing the text of your advert can increase the CTR, or perhaps better your conversion rate. Test different landing pages to see what converts better.