Pay Per Click (PPC) such as AdWords and Facebook are one of the many ways of promoting your website online to drive traffic to your site. At the end of the day it will result in making more profits due to promoting your business online.
One of the main advantages of PPC campaigns is that you can rank in search results more or less instantly without any problems and you only have to pay for what you use – its like pay as you go service. If no one clicks on your ad you don’t get charged, but I’m sure that will defeat its purpose. Now by setting up an ad and getting it up to the top results doesn’t necessary mean that its going to be a successful ad and you’re going to get loads of people clicking on it – sorry to sound harsh, But its the reality, just like any other ad offline such as a newspaper or magazine ad, you don’t get instant results and the cause of this is normally because your advert is not good enough, or its not in front of the right person at the right time.
The same applies to the online world, if your ad is not attractive don’t expect your ad to be a big hit and do wonders for your website. But lets not lose hope, I’m going to outline below how you can create a killer PPC ad, and what factors to consider in setting up successful ad.
Let’s start with the basics
The first thing one needs to understand is how exactly PPC works, especially if you’re new to the online world (welcome to Cyber World!). So PPC is a campaign where you create an advert that gets displayed in the sponsored sections of search results (normally on the right hand side of Google and across the top) and also it gets displayed on users running Google AdSense programs on their sites. You only get charged for your advert when someone clicks on it.
Below you can see the areas on Google’s Search Results page where the sponsored adverts are displayed.
Why choose PPC over other marketing
There are many reasons why you would choose PPC to promote your website online. One of the main reasons is that your site becomes visible to searchers more or less instantly after you’ve created your advert, there’s no waiting around for your site pages to be indexed. This works very well if you’re new online and just launched your website and your waiting for your site to be fully indexed and reap the full rewards of SEO. As SEO takes slightly longer then creating an advert, PPC is a perfect way to put your site up there in front of others in less time.
As your site starts to rank well you can start to reduce the amount you’re spending on your PPC campaign and invest that in other marketing methods online and offline.
Another situation when you may consider to use a PPC is when you want to launch a new product or a new service, but you also want to test the service and see what response users are giving to it. You could create a landing page on your site, to which you can divert your ad traffic to, which you can monitor the results and test. This doesn’t just apply to launching new services, you can use the same method if you’re looking to expand into other countries or you want to target more visitors from certain areas. You can set your Google Adwords campaign to show in certain countries only, or even to test different language, to give you an idea of what to expect, it’s a good way of testing the waters.
These are just couple of reasons why you would consider PPC, feel free to share some of your reasons below in the comments on why & when you have used PPC.
How to create the Killer Ad
There are some basic factors to consider in setting up the perfect PPC ad so that you benefit from your campaign.
Reason – When creating your PPC click ad you need to have a clear picture of what you want to promote, is it a service, a product, or your brand. Decide exactly on what you’re looking to promote with your PPC campaign, as this will make the next steps easier for you. So have a clear picture of the reason why you want this ad up there.
Goal – After you have decided on what you want the ad to be about, the next step is deciding on what you want your ad to do. Once the user clicks on your ad… What Next?! Do you want them to buy something, contact you, generate a lead for you, there needs to be a call of action after they land on to your site. As you don’t want them to leave empty handed, as you’ve just paid for them to come on to your site.
Sometimes it’s better to work backwards, looking at your site and the call of actions you have on your site and how your site is performing and converting visitors. If you don’t have any call of action on your site, or your site is not very appealing, then you need to adress to this first, before launching your campaign. Otherwise it’s going to be money split down the drain. Having in mind what you want your visitors to do will help you in setting up call of actions on your site for your visitors.
Based on this you might want to create a landing page for your ad, which will have a clear bold message and direct your visitors to what you want them to do next, either buying your product or services, contacting you, or even subscribing to your newsletters, whatever your goal may be, there has to be one, to make your campaign worth while.
Research – This may sound obvious, but it’s forgotten many of the times, for example things like whom you will be targeting, and see who your ideal audience will be. To do a quick research you can ask your self some basic questions:
- Who will be using the product or service
- Is the service or product for all age groups and locations
- How will they benefit form using my services or products
Attractive ad: Once you’ve done your market research and you know whom you want to target, so now you’re ready to create an advert. The first thing that will determine if your ad is clicked on is the Title. Choose a title that will reflect what you’re promoting and also something that will be familiar to your audience and market. You can choose to mention your offers, promotions in your title to make it more appealing to the eye – something like FREE or SALE, or even 50% Offer are all keywords that we pick up and stand out from others. One mistake that you can make easily here is copying your competitors titles, this will not make your ad stand out, but instead it will just blend in with the rest and defeat its purpose.
The content of your ad should be simple and straight forward, you don’t want to over complicate your ad. The more simple and clear the message is, the more users will like it and will click on it. Don’t forget to include at least one of your keywords in your ad, which will help your ad with its ranking in search engines.
If you’re promoting a certain product, you can also mention the price of your product in your ad title, something along these lines Holidays from £200. A title like this will stick out from your competitors and also if someone is searching for a cheap holiday, it will be appealing towards them.
Choosing correct keywords: After you have created your ad, you need to choose some keywords. One of the mistakes many make and even myself in the beginning, was choosing a lot of broad keywords, which always resulted in showing the ad to searchers that may not even be looking for your product or service. The other disadvantage in choosing broad keywords is the tough competition you end up facing , as you now know that PPC campaigns work on a bidding system and if your trying to rank for broad keywords such as “shoes” or “Wight Loss” it can be difficult especially if your running a low budget campaign, as all the major competitors will easily out bid your ad.
The keyword selection process works hand in hand with your market research phase above, as you would know by this stage whom you’re looking to target, what your potential buyers tend to generally look for online, so based on this you can select your keywords accordingly.
After you have chosen your keywords you will need to set a budget, basically how much are you will pay for users to click on your ad. Each keyword has its own price and budget, normally the keywords that are more in demand are higher then others. Again if the keyword selection process is done correctly you will be able to pick up some good keywords at a good price, which will be relevant to your business and market.
Test – Once you have created and published your ad, it’s not advisable to leave your ad on auto pilot and to forget about it which is easily done. You will need to test you’re ad constantly to ensure its performing to your expectation and also correct things that may need correcting on your ad. Leaving your ad on auto pilot can result in you paying for advertisement that may not be beneficial to your business as it will not convert.
Once you log into your AdWords account, the first page and the keywords page gives you a good overall view of how your ad is performing, how many impressions it has had and how many clicks you have had for each keyword.
One of the best ways of testing your ads is to do split testing, basically creating 3-4 different variations of your advert and letting them run at the same time. This is so you can measure which one are more effective and which one is giving you more in return. Some points to help you create variations of your ad:
- Titles: Test different titles with your ad, see which title is getting you more results, is it the Title with a call to action, or is it the title which displays your price or offer?
- Description: Again similar to your title, change the description of each ad, try different phrases, and words. Sometimes the common words which you might think will work well does not necessary get the same response as you expected. Take some time to think out of the box and come up with couple of variation.
- Time: Another way of testing your ads is the time and day you display your ad, are you just displaying them during the week, or weekends. Alter these settings and monitor what sort of response you get.
- Landing Page: Besides altering the ad contents and settings, you can also try sending your visitors to different landing pages and see which one converts best for your business. Your ad may be perfect, but the landing page may need changing or altering to give your campaign that final finish. Take some time to test various landing pages.
- Locations: Try testing different locations of your ad, sometimes you might get the response you’re looking for in other areas. Hence trying different locations will give you a better idea of which areas to focus on and which locations need more work.
PPC can be beneficial and bring in good results, if it is done correctly and monitored constantly.
