Process
Beware of spending your profit margin on Google's affiliate campaigns
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns can be effective when well run and maintained. They are designed to match offers closely to their consumers, and if the campaign precisely targets potential customers for your solution, it can work wonders.
PPC also comes with excellent statistical data for monitoring progress. You can see where clicks are coming from, where they were led to on the site, and the conversion (or success) rate of these visits.
However, PPC needs an expert hand to set up, monitor, analyse, and interpret the campaigns effectively.
Codastar's process is as follows:
1/ Keyword research and grouping
A careful, highly targeted selection of keywords is crucial. Niche keyword research is also useful, as they can be very cheap to run, yet highly profitable.
2/ Demographic/Geographic targeting
Where and when your ads run needs to be targeted towards your core market. For example, if you are marketing to parents, running ads during the school run is a waste. If you only trade in Greater London, advertising in Leeds is equally wasteful.
3/ Start campaign with multiple ads
Wording different ads and allowing Google to rotate them will produce interesting results, both in learning which ads Google finds more pertinent to use, and the click-through response they get.
4/ Create appropriate landing pages for the ads
This is necessary if the pages of your website
aren't specific enough to be a match for all the ads
you are running. In most cases, directing all your
ads
to the home page is a mistake. Google may not find
sufficient relevance in your actions, and your conversion
rate may also suffer. Direct potential customers
straight to a page that would provide a logical step
from the ad clicked.
5/ Monitor CTRs and Conversion rates.
CTR = Click Through Rate.
This is Google term used to show the ratio between how often your ad is visible and how often it is clicked on. Again, keyword selection is crucial in defining your click through rate. A very general keyword will get tons of impressions but few click-throughs. A very topical keyword specific to your services and location will be displayed much less, but clicked more often (this will also be cheaper!)
6/ Analyse/Optimise
As always with our processes, improvement comes with the practice of Test and Measure. How else can you be sure that the system works? Which keywords are wasting your budget, and which are making you a small fortune? Is Google the only one profiting, or have you found a way to make Google work for you? Only Test and Measure has the answer!
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