PPC for Small Business – Don’t Let Google Ruin Your Life: Chapter 3
Thanks for being with me for third time when we are discussing the search marketing strategies for small business. In previous two posts we discussed – ways to get more quality visitors to our website through organic search engine optimization and link-building. Now we will discuss most easy at the same time very difficult part of search marketing – ‘Pay Per Click’ Marketing.
Now you should be ready to pay for every visit you receive through search engines. This might be slightly different from traditional mediums where you pay for impressions or a time-bound fee.
To advertise on major search engines you just need to pay money and you get visitors. However till the time you don’t understand it properly you won’t get quality visitors.
You can go ahead and create accounts on these 3 major platforms; Google is most popular by far.
PPC Structure
ppc-ad-structure
1. Ad Campaign – To start with the PPC Marketing you have to create a campaign. Create a campaign by setting up your budget for every day. It will be very important to figure out your objective before starting your new PPC campaign. This will help you to go ahead and create an effective search marketing strategy.
2. Ad Group – Create an Ad Group keeping all similar products together. If one of your products is entirely different from other then create different ad groups. For example Jasmine & Rose could be considered just flowers but they are completely different for a customer. So create different ad groups for different flowers J
3. Keywords – Now that your campaigns and ad groups are placed properly in themes. It’s time to look for right keywords for each ad group. You can use keyword tools provided in your account. Try to find the high search volume keywords but make sure of relevancy to your products. Relevancy is the key to success in PPC.
Don’t forget to develop a list of negative keywords also. Many people search to do some research and few actually to buy. It is important to figure out keywords that are not relevant for you. Like you don’t have any free offers or tutorials in your product list, better you add these keywords as negative. But if you have only free downloads and tutorials than ‘high quality’ will be a negative word for you.
4. Ads – This will be the most difficult part. You have to write ads that will show up when people search for your selected keywords. Try to make a search like a customer and figure out what other competitors have written. Now try to add some freshness in your ads. Because this is first chance to stand-out among the competitors.
Bonus Tip
A. Use keyword insertion while writing an ad. So whenever someone search for your keyword the ad will also include that keyword. This will be best to show your relevance to customers. For example
Best {Keyword} Services
Execellent Redecoration &
Redesign. Staring at $500!!
www.mywebsite.com/redecoration
B. Use custom display url, the actual url is different from display url for ads so make sure to add theme keyword for ads.
5. Landing Page – landing pages are actually the page where your customers will reach just after clicking your ad. So it’s better to send different customers to particular landing pages so they don’t waste time search for your products. You can tailor pages for different products and campaigns you are running. This will help you to show that you already understand what customers are looking for.
Bonus Tip
landing pages & call-to-action
C. Call to Action – Create your pages with 2 call to actions. Because some customers are ready to buy and others need time. For first use compelling text, images and buttons to Buy your product. For second ones you can create offers to serve some purpose, for example
- free consultation
- free e-book download or
- offer newsletters
D. Scheduling – Try to schedule your campaign for particular cities, states and even for particular time of day, weekdays or even only on weekends. This should be done considering how your preferred customers will search on internet.
E. Test, Test & Test – Keep testing all elements of your PPC Campaign. Keywords, ads, scheduling, Landing pages by keeping eye on your results. You can also use few measures like:
- CTR (Click Through rate) – Clicks to Total impressions, don’t look to set a parameter for CTR for keywords and ads but try to increase as much by stopping low performing ones.
- Bounce Rate – How many visitors leave your landing pages without visiting any other page vs total visit on that page.
- Conversion or sales – Overall success of your PPC Campaign depends on numbers of conversions or sales or any other goals you set. Try to analyze every element on that parameter and try to optimize the whole campaign.
Here we are completing our series on Search Marketing for Small Business. However there’s always some space for improvement, I will keep writing to help you achieve most out of your Internet Marketing.
