9 Questions to Ask Before Entering Into A PPC Campaign

These questions are questions you should ask yourself once you have completed your research phase and have collected data on what your campaign should be like, with information such as keywords, competitor campaign information etc.

Searchers type their search into a search engine, they then receive a page with organic and paid listings.  The organic listings come from search engines algorithms which are completely natural and cannot be bought.  Paid advertisements come about from matching keywords to those that you have bid for/buy in an auction model.  The placement of these advertisements on the page is based on the maximum bid you will pay and your quality score which is how relevant you are to the search you bid for.  You pay when someone clicks on your advertisement, that person is then taken to the page on your site which you selected the advertisement to go to.

With this knowledge in hand, entering into your campaign can be daunting, here are some questions that get asked quite often regarding PPC.

There is no correct answer here, but you can be sure that too few is not going to bring you in the custom you would like even if it is easy to manage.  Keywords individually generate a revenue for your company, so it stands to reason that the more you have the more profit you stand to make.

The down side to this is that the more keywords you have, the more optimisation you will have to do on your website, which isn’t easy with so many terms to squeeze in.  Size is really decided by how relevant and likely to increase profit your keywords are, and this is something you will learn over time, trial and error with keywords is the key.

The sad truth here is that you will not really be able to answer this question until you start your account, the only thing you can do is set daily budgets so your spend doens’t go beyond your means.  Cost per clicks can range from small figures to even €20, it really depends on the popularity of your keywords.  The thing to remember is that you have gotten the chance to attract a person to your site who may not have come otherwise, so it’s worth it.

Of course search engines have guildines and rules as to what is allowed be in an advertisement, for example no “bad” words are allowed in PPC campaigns.  There is also further rules for some industries such as gambling, guns etc.

For beginners, the best search engines are the big three – Google, Yahoo and Bing.  These three take up the vast majority of all searches.  Each search engine has their own system for billing and managing your account which you will need to learn, test and understand, so start small initially and then expand when you feel you are ready.

This is a process of trial and error, and totally up to you.  Make sure if you are unsure how well a keyword is working that you add it to a group so you can pause it if you feel it’s necessary so you are not wasting time.  Pausing is a lot easier than deleting, as this means you have to do more research as to what keywords you should be using.  Remember to test words you are unsure about with smaller budgets so you can get a feel for them and see if they are something that is worth continuing with.

The best way to do this is to put similar keywords in groups, there is normally a fairly obvious distinction between which words should be together and which shouldn’t.  Make sure you have several groups and that they are grouped by topic, that will be enough for the start.

Right now Google is the only one that will allow you to do this, the other big search engines do not allow you to bid on this or add it to your text.

Click fraud is tough, there’s is a lot of definitions for it.  One is when a competitor clicks your advertisement so many times that they drain your budget, therefore making your PPC campaign pricey.  Luckily, search engines have got technology that aims to stop this kind of behaviour, but if you are still unsure you can use other systems to investigate if this is occurring.  These things are monitored by IP clicks, and if you are getting several clicks that seem questionable, search engines will take this into account in your statement.  The best way to fight it yourself is to keep on top of your keywords and see which ones aren’t working and if this is the case then pause them.

Always devote time and energy to your PPC campaign, monitor keywords and building your account daily.  When your campaign is up, it needs to be robust and testing targeting, keywords and more.  It also needs to be set up in such a way that it is easily changed, grouping will help here, if you have different products/services separate them so if one needs to be stopped it won’t affect the others.  Make sure it is not so big that you can’t handle the management of it, in a case where it has to be this way the easiest thing to do is to hire a professional.

We hope this helped with any initial questions regarding PPC and web marketing, for more information,contact us.  For more information on this topic, click here.