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Advertising with Pay Per Click (PPC) puts you in full control of how much you spend, which searches actually spend your money, and where these searches send your future clientele. One of Pay Per Clicks most enticing features is that minutes after setting your account live, searchers interested in what you have to offer come knocking.

There is definitely a right and wrong way to do Pay Per Click. These three principles of pay per click management will ensure you are doing things the right way and receiving the success you are looking for.

The Three Keys:

• Know your product & clientele
• Keep your campaigns defined and relevant
• Test, test, and test some more!

Know your Product & Clientele:

Far too often, I am shocked when a client does not know their own product. As a business owner you should be able to identify your most popular product, profitable product, and have CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) goals. Successful Pay Per Click management is based on detailed structure. Knowing what products you need to focus on will enable you to structure your campaigns appropriately.

An understanding of your product goes hand in hand with understanding the people looking for your product. You are the expert when it comes to your business and services. You know all of the lingo, terms, and stats. Your clientele doesn’t. Research and identify what kinds of questions searchers ask when looking for your product. What kinds of things do they search for? What types of things do they search when trying to research, compare, and eventually buy your product? Focus on those searches that lead your client to buy your product. There is no point in spending money on the keywords of researchers or comparers.

Keep your campaigns defined and relevant:

Let’s say I own a library. If you were to visit my library, you might think you walked into a bookstore instead. I have to organize my bookcases by genre. All of my books are organized by author and then alphabetically. If a book is on the wrong shelf, or there’s a “d” before “b,” I get twitchy. Your Pay Per Click campaigns should be just as organized and you too should get fidgety and twitchy when something is out of place! To put it simply, create your campaigns like a neat freak would organize a bookshelf.

A Pay Per Click account is set up very much like a Matryoska Doll. You decide how much you would like to spend and where to target by your campaign. You campaign contains AdGroups. Your AdGroups contain Keywords & Ads. If your Pay Per Click Account has one campaign containing one AdGroup which contains 50+ keywords and 5+ ads, you are doing something very wrong!

Campaigns:
While you can divide your campaigns in a number of ways, I like to separate my campaigns by targeted location. This will enable you to quickly see what target areas are spending your money and bringing you a lot of sales. It will also tell you what campaigns are spending your money and not bringing you any sales!

AdGroups:
You should have an adgroup for each of your products and product types. If you sell sneakers, don’t just have a sneaker AdGroup, have a Red Sneaker AdGroup, Yellow Sneaker AdGroup, etc. The more you define your AdGroups the more defined your keywords will be.

Keywords:
When building out your keyword list, only include keywords you think will convert or bring relevant  traffic to your site. Avoid overly broad one-word keywords. These terms are usually incredibly competitive and don’t necessarily drive a lot of relevant traffic.

The idea is to bid on keywords that will convert. For example: buy red converse sneakers. Someone bidding on that keyword knows exactly what they want and is ready to purchase from you. Try to keep your list of keywords per AdGroup small. If you have more than 20 keywords in an AdGroup there is a good chance some of those keywords would perform better in their own group.

Ads:
The best part about Pay Per Click is the ads! All of your ads should be very relevant to your keywords. A well organized AdGroup will have at least one word from all of your keywords in the ad. Looking at the Cool Produce example image on the right, you can see that all of my Orange AdGroup keywords contain the word “orange.” My ad copy also has the word “orange” in it a couple of times. Make your ads interesting and enticing. If you have deals or specials, be sure to include them! All of your ads should have a call to action or something that drives them to click and buy. Keep in mind that when someone clicks on your ad, they should be going to the page that is most relevant to your keywords, not your homepage.

All in all, the more organized and defined your account is, the more success you will have. Making an orange, apple, and banana AdGroup instead of a Fruit AdGroup will always bring you better results, mostly because your ad copy will be very relevant to your keywords. Plan your campaign structure out before you create it. Google puts a lot of weight on first impressions!

Test, Test, and Test some more!:

You should always be tracking your accounts statistics. I recommend using Google Analytics. Google Analytics will enable you to tie clicks to conversions. By understanding what campaigns, adgroups, keywords, and ads are bringing you the most sales, you will understand where to spend your money and where to improve your campaign.

With your ads being the only thing your searching customers will see, they are very important to track. I recommend only having a few ads per AdGroup. Change your campaign settings to have ads display on a rotation so that all of your ads receive a relatively equal amount of traffic. With all of your ads being shown the same amount, you’ll be able to identify what ad copy works and what doesn’t. Let your ads run for a week, compare the two, then pause the underperforming one and make a new ad. Your new ad should be very similar to the already successful ad except for a small tweak or change. Perhaps, “Buy Now & Save” performs better than, “Buy Today & Save”. Test your ads out and see what works!

There are a number of great strategies and methods out there when it comes to Pay Per Click. If you follow these three PPC principles, the success of your business is just a click away.