PPC Advertising tips for Small Businesses

Pay Per Click advertising has become a combination of art and science in the recent past. It is an art of selecting keywords & writing ads and a science of optimizing bids. Gone are the days when you can simply outbid your competitor for the highest rank. Your rank now depends on various factors but mainly on your actual bid, keyword to ad relevancy, ad to page relevancy, click-through-rate and landing page quality. Not to mention location targeting and daily budgets. A higher rank may work in your favor but it is not the be-all and end-all. There are so many factors that determine the success of your campaign and you cannot afford to be complacent about anything. To begin with, your cost per click needs to make business sense and if you don’t take appropriate time to research and plan well, your ROI will suffer. Similarly, you can embellish your ads with all types of offers and discounts but if you are driving traffic from wrong keywords, no business will come your way. In this article, we would like to offer some tips on key exercises for running a successful search campaign. Remember, there’s no gain without trial and error. Be prepared to spend some money to find out what works and what doesn’t.

Start Small (both bids and budgets)

A daily $10 budget may seem small but it is $300 per month. If you have no history of online advertising, you need to cap your budgets properly and you can only do so if you select your keywords carefully. Start small. Don’t go after all the major keywords of your industry. Be wise about your industry’s search behaviour and look to include keywords that make the most sense. It is not a bad idea to come up with a list of keywords yourself. You certainly need to be aware of what people are searching for so using various keyword tools out there can get you that information. Carefully select 50-100 keywords that you feel are most relevant to your marketing objectives and start with those. No matter how much you can afford to spend, you will soon realize no budget is enough. Search is a beast when it comes to spending. Once you have selected the keywords, figure out how much you would be willing to pay for each click. Again, you can gather this information from keyword tools.

Also Read: Advertising Your New Small Business

Test Various Landing Pages:

Drive people on various pages so you can test what pages bring you the best results. Depending on what you are selling, you will want to test variety of entry points to see how users flow through your website. Unless you do that, you will never know what people like on your website. Conversion rate is all you need to care about once you start spending money so you need to know where to land people on the site. Each page will perform differently so if you find a winner, you can persist with it. Don’t test too many pages with small budgets initially as the results will not give you large enough data to understand much. (Look for Landing Page Designing Services)

Test multiple messages in your ads and stay relevant:

When you are writing ads for search engines, you have a character limit to play with. You can’t write too much so making sure you mention the core of your offer in those 95 characters is very important. This means you need to test variety of messaging to see what resonates with people. On the other hand, very often people will run ads with a headline that has absolutely no mention on the landing page. If your offer is 30% off on a product, you better show that offer on the landing page. Or if the price reflected in the ad is not reflected on the landing page, you are sure going to lose the customer. Deceiving doesn’t work. For e.g. if your landing page for men’s shoes receives traffic from ad written for women’s shoes, you are sure going to antagonize the user. That is not only a bad user experience but it is also poor campaign structuring which will eventually raise your cost per click. Be careful – run ads that have direct connection with your landing page for better conversion rate.

Also Read : Importance of website conversion

Persistence is key:

And finally, don’t give up easily. It is easy to burn through your initial budgets without much success but don’t be disheartened by it. Online advertising is all about trial and error initially. Moreover, no advertising campaign does well right out of the gate. You need to fine tune a lot of things before you start seeing results that align with your ROI. You can only fine tune if you have large enough data to measure. So be persistent for few months before deciding to continue or discontinue.

Also Read : What Is Your Actual Average Position On PPC Ads

Do you have questions about your pay-per-click campaign? Feel free to reach out to us at info@v18media.com