15 Pay Per Click Marketing Tips

I have been doing pay per click marketing for too many years. Sometimes I forget what I know. Not that I am bragging. It's just that you can't help but learn stuff after staring at thousands of keyword bids, keyword variations, competitors, and ad copy for hundreds and hundreds of hours, month after month, year after year. So I thought I'd make this a quick post with some good pay per click marketing tips. No, this is NOT a treatise on PPC. That will come later. Anyway, here we go...

1. Before you get started, I think the most important thing for you to realize is that you are not trying to reach everyone on the planet! You aren't using a shot gun here. You want a laser beam focused exactly on your target audience - your bullseye. That's why you start NARROW and slow. Then expand outward farther away from your bullseye only as you see success! Your initial goal with pay-per-click is to locate your "bullseye keywords" first. These are the words that get you what you want with as little expense as possible - your highest ROI words.
2. Define what you feel is a “successful event” or “desired action.” We’ll call this a conversion. Your conversion might be someone completing a form, purchasing an item, or visiting a certain webpage. Only you can run the money numbers and determine how much you are willing to spend for a desired action.
3. Install a robust web analytics package on your site. You want to be sure you can track things down to the keyword. DO THIS NOW. Thankfully, Google Analytics is still free, and you can use it for all your various pay per click adventures. (At least I think it works for all of 'em. If not, please let me know.) Whatever you use, you'll want to use tracking codes so you can see which keywords are performing best. You can install Google Adwords tracking code on your site and the data will automatically port over to your Google Analytics account.
4. Start with Google Adwords for your first pay per click test. Reason? They get a ton of traffic so you’ll know relatively quickly what your results are.
5. Brainstorm each target market for your product or service.  If you are a professional photographer, you might have several different types of people – people getting married, families who need a portrait, pregnant woman who want to capture the memory, couples who just had a baby, on and on.
6. Develop separate “seed” keyword lists for each target market. In our example, the initial keywords you research might be: wedding photography, portrait photographer, pregnancy photographer, baby photos. The main point here is avoid lumping all your keywords into one big bucket. Divide them up into as many buckets as you think are relevant to your product or service. Does this take a lot of work? Yes. Will it pay off? Yes. In spades. (I have no idea what that phrase means, but it makes me sound smart and witty so I’ll use it.)
7. Within your Adwords campaign, create a different Ad Group for each of your target markets. Don't get lazy here. Go the extra mile and focus on each demographic. It will pay off, and you will learn tons just from the analytics alone.
8. When setting up your Adwords campaign, test your ads on the Google Search Network first. Then test them on their Content Network (also known as site-targeted.) The reason is that Google search tends to generate more targeted and motivated visitors. People how click on your ads from the Content Network tend to be less inclined to buy. But not always! That is why you test!
9. Use the built-in Google keyword tool to develop your keyword list. Only choose keywords that have green bars. Use negative keywords to prohibit your ads from showing (Ex> -thiswontshow). When starting out, I would avoid single keywords. That's a quick way to burn through your budget fast. Use keyword phrases that have a minimum of 2 words. Try out phrase match first. Phrase matches have quotation marks around them like this: "pay per click advice".
10. Write compelling ad copy. Think benefits and action! The reader could care less about you. They want to know: What's in it for me? Write 2 different ads so you can test the performance of each ad against the other. Then after 100 clicks or so, ditch the bad Google ad and write a new one. Also, don’t write one long sentence for your ad. Make it like a little 3-sentence poem with a title, benefit, and feature. Try to use your keywords in the ad. Make your ad obvious. This isn’t the place to get clever. Tell the reader exactly what they will get if they click.
11. Choose a specific landing page that matches your ad. All keywords SHOULD NOT lead to your home page.
12. Set a low budget to start to try things out. Don’t bid for the top position. Sometimes the 3rd position or even the 9th position may convert well for you. But don’t get cocky. Move your bids around and track your conversions.
13. Compare your spend with your conversions. Are you profitable? Note which keywords got the most clicks. Note which words got clicks but did not convert. Brainstorm more keywords. Add. Delete. Tweak. Note which ads performed best.
14. Expand only after you make your conversions profitable. Increase your spend. Try new variations of keywords. Try Google’s content network.
15. Try other PPC engines like Yahoo! Search Marketing and MSN adCenter, or other smaller engines like Industry Brains or Quigo.

This really is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to effective pay per click marketing, but I hope this helps!

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You might also like this post about the The Importance of AB Testing.

Comments

[Jason T Chandler]

Eric,

Good clearly written stuff as usual. You might add that even though it seems logically simple, most people I have trained to set up their own campaign have needed to have their hand held the entire setup. I mean from the first question:
Do you want Basic or Advanced Adwords account? Pretty much knocking the confidence out of my client that I had so nicely built up over the few days of training.

I guess the technology is what is creating the barrier to entry, and keeping us employed!

You're the best, Eric!

Seharness

[TomNcp]

Thanks for all the information about pay per click, I was looking exactly for the same kind of marketing tips...

[orange county pay per click]

Thank you for the Pay Per Click Marketing Tips you've shared to us. I really like it. it will really help me to expand my knowledge regarding pay per click.

-faith-