Pay Per Click Campaign Management

Three Essential Pay Per Click Tips

It doesn’t matter if you’re choosing Google, Yahoo or MSN for your pay per click ad campaign.  Sure, there are quirks and complexities to using each platform.  And just because an ad works for Google doesn’t mean it will work on the other two platforms.

But that’s getting a bit ahead of ourselves here.  Before you optimize your pay per click campaigns for each platform, you need to address some basic flaws that 90% of the people typically have with their PPC ad campaigns.

So what are those flaws?  They involve…

1. incomplete keyword research
2. poor pay per click ad campaign structure
3. improper target landing page selection and/or language

We’ll discuss each one of these at length below.

Pay Per Click and Keyword Research

Understand this one point.  EVERYTHING is driven online by proper use of keywords (or “tags” for social media sites).  Organic page rankings (from SEO), social media, and pay per click are ALL based or triggered by keywords.

Rob and I were just discussing this morning how the basis of all online activities for business revolve around keywords and proper keyword research.

In fact, our upcoming program “Keyword Clinic” will not only cover this in greater detail, but will provide a process map for effective keyword research across the three tiers of online marketing activity:  SEO, social media, and pay per click.

So, it’s pretty obvious to point out that the effectiveness of your pay per click campaign involves both the keywords you’ve selected to target, and the ones you’ve chosen to ignore.

Here’s a quick tip:  in campaigns you’ve run in the past or are currently using, have you targeted common misspellings?  How about different variants for spacing, such as

• “pay per click”
• “payperclick”
• “payper click”

Remember, people searching online are NOT interested in grammar.  Or spelling.

Add these variants to your campaign and track the results.  Chances are your competitors were too lazy to add these to their campaign (or they haven’t talked with us yet).

Pay Per Click Ad Campaign Structure

To get better than average results with pay per click (which is, after all, the name of the game), you need to structure your campaigns wisely.

Why?

Well, chances are your not the only company in your niche/industry using pay per click to generate more business.  If you really like to overpay for clicks, it will affect your bottom line.

The idea is to create solid pay per click campaign structure, which will allow you to gradually reduce your cost per click while maintaining solid position with respect to everyone else.

For real.

Here’s a quick snapshot of what NOT to do:

1 campaign, 1 adgroup for the entire campaign, 1 ad, with 100 keywords (or more) stuffed in there.

That, my friends, is a recipe for disaster.  And it’s how most people run their campaigns.  In fact, it’s also how a lot of companies you may hire for pay per click management will run your campaign.

How do we know?  Cause we’ve seen it time and again.

Now, here’s what you should be doing:

1 campaign per product, at least 2 adgroups (or more), split testing 2 ads per adgroup, with no more than 10 keywords per adgroup.

Constantly split test, dropping ads that under-perform and adding new ads to beat your control.

Running your campaigns this way IS more work.  But the results will speak for themselves.  Here’s a real life case study taken from a client who recently hired us to run their pay per click campaign:

Using another company, their PPC  from 11/21/08 to 12/18/08 generated 45 leads at a total cost per click of $5688.76.  Their cost per lead was $126.42.

Starting from scratch with us, their PPC campaign from 2/3/09 to 2/28/09 generated 45 leads at a total cost per click of $1584.  Their cost per lead was $35.20.

Yes, proper campaign structure makes a HUGE difference in your results.  Putting in the time and effort upfront is the best way to generate better than average (if not outstanding) results.

Pay Per Click Target Landing Page

This last issue involves your lead conversion more than generating the clicks in the first place.  We’re including it here, however, because getting this right will put more money in your pocket.  It will also determine in your pay per click campaign is a winner… or not.

Forget about quality score for a moment.  What we’re discussing here is more about business than about your Google PPC performance.

Quality score matters with Google.  That’s why campaign structure is so critical (for Google, anyway), and why so many businesses are overpaying for PPC with Google.  But that’s a topic for another day…

The focus here is on the web page people land on once they click your ad.  Here’s an example of what we’re talking about.

A friend (not client) ran a pay per click campaign about six months ago.  She offers a huge range of products, but chose to do a campaign on custom pens.

When folks clicked on the ad, care to guess which page of her website people landed on?

If you guessed her “Home” page, you got it right.

Now, let me clue you in on a little online psychology.  Folks are NOT going to connect the dots for you.  Nor are they going to do more digging than necessary to find out where your treasure is.

Do you want to know why?

Because everything else is just a click away.  They’ll click on the back button so fast YOU won’t know what hit you.  So, in her case, you better send people to the page about pens if you’re running an ad about pens.  Otherwise, they’ll be outta there and you’ll just keep spend money for nothing.

So, make sure there is a tight relevancy and/or overlap between your ad (the marketing message generating the clicks) and the message on your landing page (the place where you want your visitor to take action).

On a side note, she shut down her campaign a couple of months ago.  In her words it was “a waste of money” and wasn’t “working out” for her.  Yeah, no kidding.

If you’d like to leave any questions or comments about the article, that would be great.  If you’d like us to review your current (or failed) pay per click campaign we’d be happy to talk with you to see what we can do.

You CAN make money and build your business by using Pay Per Click effectively.  Hopefully our article showed you a few things to help you immediately.

Stay tuned for other articles on the subject.  We’ll also be releasing a DVD soon discussing proper strategies for PPC, covering Google, Yahoo, and MSN.  If this is something you’d be interested in, you can leave a comment or send us an email.

Next Steps…

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