Starting your first PPC marketing campaign may feel surprisingly simple—you could do it in just six steps. Remember, ad quality plays a large part in your campaign’s success, so make sure you take your time and focus on each step.
1. Figure Out Your PPC Budget
How much do you want to spend on your pay-per-click marketing?
To begin with, you need to set an initial budget to allow you to test the waters. As a rough guide, you can look at some industry benchmarks to understand how much you’re likely to pay for each conversion.
Once you have an overall budget in mind, daily and lifetime spend caps for your campaigns.
This is an important part of creating a PPC campaign because your budget will greatly impact your ads’ success rates. Google Ads gives you good tools to help with this, and it’s worth following Google’s recommendations because its algorithms are designed to maximize your return.
You’ll be able to see an estimate of how many clicks your budget is likely to get you. From there, you can work out your potential return on investment based on your anticipated conversion rate.
If your budget doesn’t allow you to get meaningful results, it might be worth looking at some alternative marketing methods.
2. Set Your Campaign Goals
Different businesses will have different goals for their pay-per-click campaigns.
For example, if you’re doing a pre-launch for a start-up, your goal might be to drive traffic to the site and create awareness. If you’re selling a product, your main goal may be conversions.
The goals you set will have a big impact on your marketing campaign because each goal has a different value. A click isn’t as valuable as a lead or a conversion, and your cost-per-click should reflect this.
Setting up your campaign with the right goals allows you to better target the correct audience and accurately measure your return on investment. You’re paying for the click, not what the customer does afterward, when you use PPC—the click costs the same whether they purchase or not.
Consider who you want to click your ad and what actions you want them to take. When you understand this, optimize your entire campaign to encourage people to take those actions, which should bring down your costs.
3. Figure Out What Type of Campaign to Run
Another element to think about with PPC is what type of campaign you’re going to run. There are lots of options here, each giving you flexibility over how you reach your target audience:
- Search ads: Ads showing at the top of search engines
- Social ads: Ads on social media platforms
- Remarketing ads: Ads that target people who have already visited your website
- E-commerce ads: Ads on Google shopping that are focused on selling products
- Instream ads: Commonly seen on YouTube, played before a video loads
- Display ads: Dynamic ads showing on third-party websites, like in the image below
All these options give you the tools you need to target specific audiences. You need to find out where your audience hangs out and what they respond to. This will change depending on the buyer personas you’re trying to reach.
You don’t have to commit to one particular type of ad, and many businesses find a mix of different ad formats works best for them. However, it’s important to keep your eye on your ROI for each ad type so you can tweak your strategy accordingly.
4. Research Your Keywords
Keywords are one of the main tools you’ll use to target your audience, and your keyword research can make or break your campaign.
While you probably have a reasonable idea of how your customers search for your products or services, you need to narrow them down to those that result in people taking action.
A big part of this is understanding user intent. For example, who is more likely to make a purchase: someone searching “what is SEO?” or someone searching for “best keyword research tool?”
It’s probably the second one because of where that search fits into the buyer’s journey. Where people are in the buyer journey dictates how likely they are to make a purchase, so the keywords you choose need to reflect which stage you’re targeting.
Keywords that attract people who are further along in the buying process will generally cost you more, but they’re also more likely to lead to conversions.
5. Bid On Your Chosen Keywords
Most platforms give you different bidding options based on your goals. With Google Ads, this allows you to optimize for:
- target CPA (cost per action)
- target ROAS (return on ad spend)
- maximize clicks
- maximize conversions
- maximize conversion value
- target impression share
Google will automatically bid on your behalf so it can optimize for your desired goal, but you still have some control over your bid. If you optimize to maximize clicks, for example, you can set a maximum bid. If you maximize for conversions, you can set a target cost per action.
It’s important to remember Google is there to help you get the most out of your ad spend. The algorithms are finely tuned to achieve this. It’s often wise to use Google’s recommendations, especially when starting out.
6. Create Keyword-focused Copy With Unique Landing Pages
Getting people to click your ads is only a small part of what you’re trying to achieve. It’s what happens when people land on your page that’s key.
No matter what your goals are, you need unique, engaging landing pages to achieve them.
Your landing pages need to offer a good user experience and be relevant to the ad the user clicked. People want quick access to the information they’re looking for, and if your landing page isn’t relevant to their keywords, they won’t hesitate to click back to Google.
In short, your PPC landing pages need to be optimized and A/B tested to make sure you’re getting the most out of them.
Conclusion
Pay-per-click advertising is an amazing way to reach a highly-targeted audience quickly. Through platforms such as Google, Bing, Facebook, Instagram, and many more, you can set up paid ads in seconds. Once approved, they could be seen by tens of thousands of people, depending on your budget.
While reaching your target audience is vitally important in marketing, the most important thing is what you do when you have people’s attention. This is why you need to give your paid campaigns the care and attention they need or find a company to do it for you.
When you find the right balance with PPC and have your ads perfectly optimized, it can bring you an excellent return on investment and become a vital part of your digital marketing weaponry.
