- Original Poster
- #1
I've not seen any articles on here covering the basics, so thought I'd post one up 
Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing can be a daunting task when you first set out as you don't know whether you're sat on a gold mine or about to throw money down the drain. PPC isn't something you should do instead of SEO, the two should be used to complement each other. So where do you start?
Your Site
Your website is the most important tool in the whole of the campaign as this is ultimately where people are going to be handing over their cash to you. Before you do any keyword research, take a look at your own site first and ask yourself objectively if you'd buy from it? If not, put aside your ideas of a PPC campaign for now as you're going to be paying for people to come to your site when you're not confident they're even going to buy anything from you. Money wasted.
If you are happy with the way your site looks and feels, time to call in some favours from friends and family. How easy is it to purchase from you? We're treading on the very basics of usability testing here, but I wouldn't suggest you go through this analysis on your own as you know your checkout process too well to give an honest unbiased opinion. If your friends and family are not finding the process easy and are getting frustrated with the whole process, then again you'll need to address this situation before embarking on the PPC route. If people are using your site and drop out at the check-out stage, then again this is money wasted.
If things are looking good so far and you've had positive feedback then we can start looking into the nuts and bolts of the campaign.
Tracking
I can't stress this enough, so I'll stick it in capitals; GET SOME FORM OF TRACKING SOFTWARE ON YOUR SITE. Analytics is brilliant for this, and it's free!
Profitability
What is your profit margin like? If you're selling relatively small items in a competitive market with a margin of say £2.00 on each item, then chances are PPC is not the route you'd want to go down. However, you can't absolutely determine this without doing some research first.
Keywords
Draw up a list of keywords that you want to be competing with other customers on and take a wander over to Google Keywords (link at the bottom). I would highly recommend not trying to bid on singular keywords unless it is your own brand name, as the competition and costs would be high. For example, if you're a web hosting company, don't bid on "hosting"; try "web hosting" or even better "linux web hosting". You get my point anyway.
Once you have your list of keywords and are staring at the Google Keywords Tool, paste this list into the box making sure that each one is on it's own line. To start off with, deselect the "use synonyms" box, and (if you're not logged into Adwords) type in the Captcha. Click on "filter my results" and click on "Don't show ideas...". Don't forget, we're only looking into the start at this point so no need to overfill the keywords at the minute with Google showing more. Then click on "Get keyword ideas".
Now you have your keywords displayed to you in a tabular format in front of you, in the drop-down box on the right click on "Show estimated CPC" and in the dropdown box below that change the Match Type to "Exact". The reason why we have changed to Exact is because this is what we're going to be bidding on to start off with as we only want our ads to display when the person searching on Google has typed in exactly the same as our keywords. To give you an example, a sign making company could bid on "warning signs" as a broad match and their ad will show up when you searched for "brain tumour warning signs".
Anyway, now your table is showing the estimated Cost Per Click (CPC) and the keywords as exact match. The average CPC is exactly that, an average so you could pay slightly more or less than that. If you also show "Estimated Ad Position" you can get an idea to roughly where your ad is going to display in the search results for that price.
Now you have the CPC and you know roughly what your conversion rate is (guess to your industry average if you're site is new and don't currently make sales), you can start to work out if your campaign is going to be viable for you or not.
In these examples, we're going to surmise your conversion rate is 10%...
Eample 1
Profit margin: £10.00 per sale
CPC: £2.00
In this example you can see it's not going to be worth the return for you as it's going to cost £20.00 to get £10.00 back
Example 2
Profit margin: £10.00 per sale
CPC: £1.00
In this example you're going to be breaking even. If you're willing to put the analysis into the stats and can see where you can improve the conversion rate, or lower the CPC then this can be turned into a profitable campaign
Example 3
Profit margin: £10.00
CPC: £0.50
Bingo! You can see that you stand a good chance of making money from this campaign as you'll be paying £5.00 to get a sale worth £10.00 in profit for you; effectively doubling your money.
As these are only rough estimates to start off with, I'll explain more about ongoing analysis at a later stage.
The Campaign
Ok, so now you know that you'd buy from your site, you've had feedback from others saying that it's a nice and simple process to buy from you, and you know that your keywords are profitable - now what?
In order to display relevant ads to your keywords, you'll need to structure your campaign so that it all ties in nicely. Granted, you can stick them all into one group and have a generic advert, but you want targeted ads otherwise your click through rate (CTR) wont be as high as it could be, and a higher CTR% the lower your CPC costs will be. Group all relevant keywords together and have them in their own individual campaigns / adgroups.
Example; you run a pet eCommerce store and you want to market the pet food. Don't put them all into one group labelled 'pet food', you could do two options:
Campaign Name: Pet Food
Adgroup: Cats
Adgroup: Dogs
Adgroup: Rabits
etc
Or you could have individual campaigns set up for Cats, Dogs, and Rabbits, and have an adgroup under each for pet food.
The Ads
Once you have the campaigns, adgroups and keywords all set out, write 3 different ads out; generic ad with your company and homepage, and two targeted ads relevant to the adgroup deep-linking into your site. The reason I suggest 3 ads is so that when you come to analysing your campaign, you can ditch the lowest performing ad and rewrite it and see what happens.
Going forward
I'll write another article at some point about further optimising your account, but like SEO it's a case of constantly monitoring your account, making changes and analysing the results. But until then, I hope covering the basics has helped some of you out!
Shaun
Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing can be a daunting task when you first set out as you don't know whether you're sat on a gold mine or about to throw money down the drain. PPC isn't something you should do instead of SEO, the two should be used to complement each other. So where do you start?
Your Site
Your website is the most important tool in the whole of the campaign as this is ultimately where people are going to be handing over their cash to you. Before you do any keyword research, take a look at your own site first and ask yourself objectively if you'd buy from it? If not, put aside your ideas of a PPC campaign for now as you're going to be paying for people to come to your site when you're not confident they're even going to buy anything from you. Money wasted.
If you are happy with the way your site looks and feels, time to call in some favours from friends and family. How easy is it to purchase from you? We're treading on the very basics of usability testing here, but I wouldn't suggest you go through this analysis on your own as you know your checkout process too well to give an honest unbiased opinion. If your friends and family are not finding the process easy and are getting frustrated with the whole process, then again you'll need to address this situation before embarking on the PPC route. If people are using your site and drop out at the check-out stage, then again this is money wasted.
If things are looking good so far and you've had positive feedback then we can start looking into the nuts and bolts of the campaign.
Tracking
I can't stress this enough, so I'll stick it in capitals; GET SOME FORM OF TRACKING SOFTWARE ON YOUR SITE. Analytics is brilliant for this, and it's free!
Profitability
What is your profit margin like? If you're selling relatively small items in a competitive market with a margin of say £2.00 on each item, then chances are PPC is not the route you'd want to go down. However, you can't absolutely determine this without doing some research first.
Keywords
Draw up a list of keywords that you want to be competing with other customers on and take a wander over to Google Keywords (link at the bottom). I would highly recommend not trying to bid on singular keywords unless it is your own brand name, as the competition and costs would be high. For example, if you're a web hosting company, don't bid on "hosting"; try "web hosting" or even better "linux web hosting". You get my point anyway.
Once you have your list of keywords and are staring at the Google Keywords Tool, paste this list into the box making sure that each one is on it's own line. To start off with, deselect the "use synonyms" box, and (if you're not logged into Adwords) type in the Captcha. Click on "filter my results" and click on "Don't show ideas...". Don't forget, we're only looking into the start at this point so no need to overfill the keywords at the minute with Google showing more. Then click on "Get keyword ideas".
Now you have your keywords displayed to you in a tabular format in front of you, in the drop-down box on the right click on "Show estimated CPC" and in the dropdown box below that change the Match Type to "Exact". The reason why we have changed to Exact is because this is what we're going to be bidding on to start off with as we only want our ads to display when the person searching on Google has typed in exactly the same as our keywords. To give you an example, a sign making company could bid on "warning signs" as a broad match and their ad will show up when you searched for "brain tumour warning signs".
Anyway, now your table is showing the estimated Cost Per Click (CPC) and the keywords as exact match. The average CPC is exactly that, an average so you could pay slightly more or less than that. If you also show "Estimated Ad Position" you can get an idea to roughly where your ad is going to display in the search results for that price.
Now you have the CPC and you know roughly what your conversion rate is (guess to your industry average if you're site is new and don't currently make sales), you can start to work out if your campaign is going to be viable for you or not.
In these examples, we're going to surmise your conversion rate is 10%...
Eample 1
Profit margin: £10.00 per sale
CPC: £2.00
In this example you can see it's not going to be worth the return for you as it's going to cost £20.00 to get £10.00 back
Example 2
Profit margin: £10.00 per sale
CPC: £1.00
In this example you're going to be breaking even. If you're willing to put the analysis into the stats and can see where you can improve the conversion rate, or lower the CPC then this can be turned into a profitable campaign
Example 3
Profit margin: £10.00
CPC: £0.50
Bingo! You can see that you stand a good chance of making money from this campaign as you'll be paying £5.00 to get a sale worth £10.00 in profit for you; effectively doubling your money.
As these are only rough estimates to start off with, I'll explain more about ongoing analysis at a later stage.
The Campaign
Ok, so now you know that you'd buy from your site, you've had feedback from others saying that it's a nice and simple process to buy from you, and you know that your keywords are profitable - now what?
In order to display relevant ads to your keywords, you'll need to structure your campaign so that it all ties in nicely. Granted, you can stick them all into one group and have a generic advert, but you want targeted ads otherwise your click through rate (CTR) wont be as high as it could be, and a higher CTR% the lower your CPC costs will be. Group all relevant keywords together and have them in their own individual campaigns / adgroups.
Example; you run a pet eCommerce store and you want to market the pet food. Don't put them all into one group labelled 'pet food', you could do two options:
Campaign Name: Pet Food
Adgroup: Cats
Adgroup: Dogs
Adgroup: Rabits
etc
Or you could have individual campaigns set up for Cats, Dogs, and Rabbits, and have an adgroup under each for pet food.
The Ads
Once you have the campaigns, adgroups and keywords all set out, write 3 different ads out; generic ad with your company and homepage, and two targeted ads relevant to the adgroup deep-linking into your site. The reason I suggest 3 ads is so that when you come to analysing your campaign, you can ditch the lowest performing ad and rewrite it and see what happens.
Going forward
I'll write another article at some point about further optimising your account, but like SEO it's a case of constantly monitoring your account, making changes and analysing the results. But until then, I hope covering the basics has helped some of you out!
Shaun
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