PPCKick-Start Your PPC Campaign in 6 Easy Steps

Kick-Start Your PPC Campaign in 6 Easy Steps

Now is the perfect time to make changes, giving you a good few months of “normal” search traffic to analyze before major events like Christmas begin to make their presence known. Here are some tips to make your PPC campaign stand out from the crowd.

running-shoesNew year, new PPC campaign… Here are some tips for making your PPC campaign stand out from the crowd this year.

1. Know Your Product

It seems obvious, but you need to know your product well enough to sell it with just a handful of words. Identify its most compelling and unique selling points, and focus on these – the same applies for offering services to customers.

Unique selling points, or USPs, have been a touchstone of marketing for generations and are as relevant online now as they ever have been in stores.

2. Know Your Market

Say you have a product that would make an excellent gift for a man. If you’re marketing it in those terms, write for a woman. Why? Because a man is much more likely to receive a gift from his wife than from anybody else – she’ll probably have a say in it even if the present is officially from the children.

Women hold the buying power in many markets, but particularly in gifts, so don’t be afraid to target them specifically.

3. Be Discriminate

That’s discriminate as in “discerning,” not as in “politically incorrect.” Following on from the point above, there’s nothing wrong with targeting a certain sub-section of your potential market.

For instance, some people will be put off by a product or service being described as “cheap,” while others – many, many others – will include that very word in their search queries.

The joy of PPC is that your ads will generally only appear to people for whom they are relevant, and you should only have to pay if they click, so in many ways your campaign will target itself, given the right range of ad texts to choose from.

4. Learn To Tweet

It may sound odd, but fitting all of the necessary information into the character count of a PPC ad can be much harder than it first sounds. If you’ve never tried it, practice on another short-form text platform, such as Twitter, or try sending an SMS or two that describe your product, service, or special offer.

Learning to appreciate the restrictions imposed by short-form text will help you to understand what can – and what can’t – be said in a PPC ad.

5. Be Timely

Think of the commercials you see on television. How many of them are simply telling you about a product or service, and how many of them relate to something time-sensitive?

It could be a new recipe or formulation, a two-for-one discount, a competition or a giveaway. By imposing some kind of time limit on the ad, you put in your potential customer’s mind the feeling that they have to buy now.

Just try to be more subtle about it than those flashing “you have won a smartphone – claim it in the next 60 seconds” pop-ups you see on some websites.

6. Review, Revise, Reinvest

PPC is about raising your return on investment. Yes, you pay for the clicks you receive, but in return for that you get a measurable flow of traffic to your site. Keep track of your best-performing ads and offers.

Tweak your PPC campaign to include more of those successful messages. As your revenues rise, consider whether you have already maxed out your market penetration – and, if not, reinvest some of those funds into increasing your PPC presence. With the right ad text and a steady growth in your monthly budget, the overall increase in ROI could prove to be exponential.

Whichever part of your PPC campaign you decide to focus on, the new year is the perfect time to make a few changes, giving you a good few months of “normal” search traffic to analyze before major events like Christmas begin to make their presence known once again.

Image Credit: MrB-MMX/Flickr 

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