Thinking about a New PPC Project? Here’s your guide…

The knowledge of Google AdWords or Microsoft Advertising is a later question. Why do you need to buy the traffic on search engine(s) or social media or LinkedIn? Let’s put the myth of comparison of traffic between organic traffic and paid traffic to rest - ‘coz, they are related, but not really related.

Step 1: Understand your Business and Identify the GOALS

Understanding your business here would mainly focus on being thorough about the user interaction with your website, the landing page(s), and the product(s) or the service(s). For example, you are running an astrology ecommerce. Your goal is to generate more sales - of course. As it is your first campaign and you have very little data available on how the user will react to your campaign. Hence, narrow it down to 1 or 2 products.

Pick the one that is giving you the best results and another where you expect results but ain’t getting the results you expect. Let’s say you have an online product where the user needs to buy minutes to talk to one of your astrologers on phone. The goal here is to sell minutes. The user behavior on your site helps you understand target keywords, landing page design, various age groups, and the geography.

Once you have goals, you would need to benchmark the Ad Spend to reach that goal.

Step 2: Setting up the Campaigns

This is where you would need to apply the understanding you gained of the user behavior and the user intent to identify the keywords. Especially in the example of ours, there could be free astrology services with call-extension, there could be location-based targeting to display within the local geography, and the one we need where you would be selling the minutes. This is where you would need to put in the extensive research on the keywords to add relevant triggers.

Further, based on the competition analysis and bid suggestions, you would need to improvise on your benchmarked numbers.

Once that is done, you can begin setting up the campaigns. Something as simple as targeting various cities could be done using dynamic targeting to display dynamics ad-copy. If you need to weed out the range of the cities from the list you have added, set an average bid and use bid adjustments to show your ad higher for your choice of the cities.

This article mainly corresponds to Search Ads, Shopping Ads will have different mechanism for campaign setup. Still not done, and should not yet make the campaigns live. 

Step 3: Negative Keywords?

If your campaign is going to target X number of keywords, there will be 4X number of keywords that you need to add in your campaigns. But not all variations of your keywords you would want to target. Those variations will be your negative keywords. You need to add prefixes, suffixes, and combinations for which you would not like to show your ad campaigns. In a situation where you have missed out on critical negative keywords or missed adding them at all, you will bleed money using PPC.

Step 4: CPA or CPC?

You are still very much in the process of setting up your campaigns, yes. Paying only when there is a conversion and paying every time there is a click. Both methods work, you would need to identify which one is more suited for your business.

What kind of number of impressions you would like to achieve? If that number is higher, CPC is a better fit for you. If not, then go ahead with CPA - at least to begin with. This question is handled with data, therefore, you should try them both over a period of time. Make sure you run the test obtaining sufficient size of sample data.

Step 5: “Dynamic Bids”

“Dynamic bids” gives you the option to let Google take care of your bid strategy. In our experience, manual bids (or manual CPC) is the better route as it saves you money.

Biztech IT Consulting Pvt Ltd is a Google Partner digital agency. We manage about $40,000 monthly spend budget. We generally follow the approach where we first invest our own time to understand your business, benchmark the expectations, and set up the campaigns. Our services are thoroughly consultative in nature and we welcome your requests to review your current requirements.

PM for further discussion. Cheers :)