After a site goes live many business owners are faced with the dilemma of how to drive traffic to their site. One of the quickest ways to drive quality traffic to a site is through pay-per-click or PPC advertising. Both Bing and Google offer pay-per-click advertising campaigns, but for an inexperienced site owner, setting up and maintaining an effective campaign can prove to be difficult.
This blog post will focus on a few simple yet vital tips on setting up and maintaining an effective pay-per-click campaign.
1.      Use keywords in your ad copy – Seems simple enough right? Customers search for a specific keyword or key phrase and when they see that keyword or key phrase in the copy of your advertisement – they click. Beyond advertising what your customers a searching for, another hidden benefit for including your keywords in the copy of your ad is that programs like Google Adwords will assign that specific campaign with a higher quality score because they deem the ad to be more relevant. Having a higher quality score will benefit advertisers by providing them with increased ad position thereby saving them money on bidding.
2.      Design a relevant landing page – It’s very common for novice advertisers to throw up advertisements in a rush to drive traffic without considering a landing page. A landing page is defined as a single web page that appears in response to clicking on a search engine optimized search result or an online advertisement. Often times site owners will use their homepage as a landing page, which isn’t always a good idea. A good landing page will provide the visitor exactly what was promised in the link they clicked. For example, if you’re advertising men’s basketball shoes – your landing page should take your visitor to a page that contains men’s basketball shoes. If your visitor arrives at a page that doesn’t contain the content promised in the link, they’ll most likely leave your site or “bounce” before a sale or action can take place.
3.   Continue to add negative keywords – After your campaigns have been up and running for a while, your account will accumulate some valuable data. One of these pieces of data is the search terms report. With the search terms report, you can see the actual searches people entered that triggered your ad and led to a click. It is vital you monitor this report on a consistent basis to identify any keywords or key phrases that are leading to irrelevant clicks. For example, your business may offer or provide “website design†services. Naturally, your keyword list may contain “website design.†Depending on how you have your keyword match types set up, your advertisement may also show for a query like “website design classes†or “website design tutorials†– neither of those key phrases are going to bring relevant traffic, so in this case it would be beneficial to add “classes†and “tutorials†to your list of negative keywords, so that your ads do not appear for those search queries in the future.
4.    Geo targeting – Geo targeting is an absolute must for businesses that offer services that are bound by location. For example, if you owned your own auto repair shop in sunny Southern California you wouldn’t want your advertisements to show to people in Rhode Island right? For this reason, PPC campaigns allow you to specify the location(s) in which your ads will appear. For businesses that sell a product that can be shipped anywhere, geo targeting does not apply.
5.  Segment your campaigns and ad groups – Another huge mistake new advertisers make is neglecting to segment their campaigns/ads. Let’s say for example you have a furniture store – you should have one campaign dedicated solely to tables (coffee tables, dining tables etc.) and another campaign for beds (bunk beds, king size beds etc.) often times, advertisers neglect to do this, and instead they’ll lump all of their products into one campaign. Going back to tip #1 having vertical campaigns that target specific products with exact keywords and ad text contributes to quality score.
These basic tips can be implemented by any business owner looking to establish a solid foundation for their PPC campaign. Be sure to check SILK’s blog on a regular basis for more tips on online marketing/advertising.