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How To Create Effective Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising Campaigns

Users' perspective of a typical PPC campaign

Let's walk through how users typically find your product or service. For this article, we will refer to a product or service together as "product". In a crowded marketplace, complete with many competing products, searchers use a variety of keywords to describe the product, in a search engine. If your ad happens to rank right alongside the search results, and the ad banner seems to describe what they are looking for, they click the banner, visit your site, and eventually end up buying into the product on offer. The situation we walked through above may also describe utopia for many companies, because potential users of the product seem to be falling through the net at one of the stages of the PPC advertising campaign described above. Let's try and break down a typical PPC campaign, into smaller elements.

Elements of a PPC campaign

A successful Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaign usually consists of 5 elements:

• Right keywords
• Smart bidding strategy
• Captivating ad copywriting
• Landing page copy writing
• Website usability

Let's concentrate on the keyword component of the PPC campaign, and understand the underlying process governing selection of keywords.

The right keyword strategy

For keyword campaigns, the primary goal is not to lower risk, but to maximize opportunity. Keep in mind that for organic SEO campaigns or PPC campaigns, the right keywords determine whether users can or cannot find your product. Using the right keywords determines the success of your campaign. Using Google's keyword expansion tool to research the keywords that are currently popular with users to find the product (or service) you offer is a recommended step. Other excellent keyword resources include WordTracker.com and KeywordDiscovery.com, which do comparative searches, and rank the resulting keywords by popularity.

Some of the other recommended methods are:

• Keyword Stemming
  Stemming involves the interchanging of singular and plural forms of a keyword or the derivation of a verb from the gerund form (the "-ing" word). For example, if "educate" was part of a keyword phrase, "educated", "educates", "education" and "educating" should also be considered.
  
  
• Location dependent keyword stemming
  If your business is location-dependent, then your targeted keywords should include those locations within the stem. For example, NewCastle Steak, Highland Scotch. These words act like catalysts, less expensive PPC words that are high quality, high converting words.
  
  
• Buying cycle keywords versus Research keywords
  If you are a B2C type of company, you may want to think about categorizing your keywords into different parts of the buying cycle. For example there are purely research oriented words such as "USB drive review" vs. specific buying words for those ready to purchase such as "Sandisk USB drive". On the most part, research words are less expensive in PPC than buying words, but research words may not convert as quickly to a sale. Depending on your marketing budget you will need to find the optimal ratio to get you the sales as well as the traffic. You wouldn't want users who are interested in buying a single tube of toothpaste, clicking on your advertising banner if you only supply fluoride chemicals in bulk. The burden of the associated advertising cost might also be difficult to justify, considering that none of the web searchers visiting the website are likely to buy your product.
  
  
• Keyword Software Assistance
  Zero in on about 25 to 30 words yourself. Try putting on a users hat and come up with potential keywords users might use. Then with the help of software available to grow that keyword list, such as Google, Overture, and wordtracker, expand that list to about 100+ keywords using the approaches we have suggested above.

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