Combining your search engine marketing strategy with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can be an effective way to reach your target audience and generate leads for your business—as long as you plan, execute carefully, and optimize continuously.
In this PPC guide 2022, you’ll learn how to plan a winning PPC campaign from start to finish.
This guide includes essential details like selecting the right keywords, setting up conversion tracking, building high-converting landing pages, and tracking all of these elements in Google Analytics so that you can measure results and optimize accordingly.
What is PPC?
PPC stands for pay per click. It works by advertisers bidding on specific keywords relevant to their business, so when someone types those words into Google or some other search engine, your ads appear at the top of their search results.
If people click on your ad, you’re charged based on how much you bid; you don’t get charged if they don’t click. And each person who clicks will be redirected either to your homepage or (more likely) to a landing page that has more information about whatever service or product they were looking for when they searched.
Launch your campaign using comprehensive PPC guide 2022
The good news is that you don’t need an army of employees and thousands of dollars to get started with your PPC campaign.
Most digital marketers start PPC by creating an account on Google AdWords and running some basic ads for pennies a day.
This strategy can certainly help you gain valuable experience before moving on to more advanced marketing strategies—or your future business could be born out of it.
To launch your first PPC campaign, follow these steps.
Step 1: Draw up your customer persona
Creating your ideal customer persona is one of the most important things you can do as a business owner. If you know whom you’re selling to, it makes your marketing process much more manageable.
As you draw up the profile, think about everything from their location to their interests. It would help consider why they would want to buy from you and how your products or services will benefit them.
If nothing else, an accurate customer persona will help ensure that all of your marketing efforts are targeted towards them specifically.
Step 2: Brainstorm possible keywords
Write down keywords that relate to your topic.
For example, if you’re writing a post about how eating healthy can help you lose weight, brainstorm keywords like weight loss and healthy eating.
It may also be helpful to look at past posts from top blogs in your niche, as they will likely use similar keywords.
Another option is to use Google Keyword Planner, which allows you to see what keyword searches are famous for your industry. Use keywords that can bring more sales for your business.
Step 3: Finalize your keyword list for the PPC campaign
Ensure that each of your keywords has 100 monthly searches or more.
This is an essential part of PPC campaign planning. Generate keyword ideas for PPC ad copy with no spaces and save it as ppc_keyword_suggestions.txt.
Open notepad and paste all your keywords list there. Start with an asterisk (*) followed by 2 dashes (–). Leave 1 space and start writing your title ideas one after another without adding any spaces between them. Use one idea only per line and continue until you get 50 to 100 ideas written out.
Step 4: Optimize your website with target keywords
For top-ranking search engine results, include your target keywords throughout your website. For better SEO, title tags, content, headlines, and even images should contain these keywords.
You should also make sure that your website is coded correctly, so search engines can see what your page contains.
Please test it out with Google Webmaster Tools and ensure you’re giving it everything it needs to index you effectively.
Put yourself in Google’s shoes, suggests Uplegger.
Step 5: Select a Bidding Strategy for your PPC campaign
To kick off your PPC campaign, you need to select an appropriate bidding strategy.
Before making that decision, you must understand how AdWords works and what you should look for when establishing your overall bid strategy.
Selecting the right bidding strategy is always a trouble for beginners. You have to choose between manual bidding or automated bidding.
If you are running PPC for the first time, opt for manual bidding as it gives you more control over the budget as allows you to set a cap on CPC.
Automated bidding is suitable for PPC experts having few successful campaigns under their sleeves. Learn from Google itself about automated bidding.
Remember that these are just general guidelines – they aren’t rules – and there are certainly exceptions to them.
Step 6: Set up a PPC budget
When planning your PPC budget, think about how much you want to spend.
Most people will tell you that $2-$5 per click is best, depending on your industry and location. You can set up your budget based on these numbers.
When choosing how much of your budget you want to dedicate to keywords and how much you want to dedicate it above the fold ad space, play around with these numbers until you find what works best for your campaign’s needs.
Determine which platforms are right for you: Facebook Ads, Google AdWords, LinkedIn Ads — there are so many different platforms that help with pay-per-click advertising.
Step 7: Write a good ad copy
Once you know your product or service and your target market, it’s time to think about crafting your ad copy.
An ad is not just text; it has several elements that need attention: The headline, description lines, call-to-action button text and color, images, and more.
Crafting ad copy that generates clicks takes time and requires some experimentation—don’t expect too much too soon.
Remember, you are paying for clicks, so don’t focus on reaching as many people as possible; instead, focus on reaching those most likely to buy from you.
Step 8: Use popular CTAs in top-performing text ads
In your campaigns, use relevant Call-to-Action (CTA) buttons for different types of ad sets.
For example, sell pet products and have multiple website pages targeting different customer personas.
You might create ad sets with similar titles and descriptions but other CTA buttons.
One with a Shop Now button that targets your site visitors are looking to buy products immediately, and another with a Learn More button that targets visitors looking to research before buying.
This is also another great way to use up those extra headline characters.
Step 9: Test Your Ads to Ensure Performance
Good ad performance isn’t just measured by how often your ads are clicked on or seen; it’s also determined by how relevant they are to your keywords.
Use these tips to test your ads and ensure they perform at their best:
A/B testing: In an A/B test, you present two different versions of an ad—say, one with a red background and one with a blue background—to other groups of people.
The version that performs better (generates more clicks or views) will be used more often. This is probably all you need for small campaigns.
Split testing: Split testing is similar to A/B testing but variations on your website landing page rather than your ads.
Step 10: Track, adjust, improve your ad campaigns.
The truth is, there’s no such thing as a perfect PPC campaign.
Like everything else, your campaign will evolve over time, and it will never be static.
You can track metrics like conversion rate, lead volume, and cost per lead across multiple campaigns to see which ones perform better than others and adjust accordingly.
That’s how you improve your overall PPC performance—by monitoring results and adjusting based on what works.
Conclusion of PPC guide 2022
The great thing about PPC is that you’re only charged when someone clicks on your ad.
That means if you set up your campaign correctly, it can be cost-effective.
But making sure things are set up correctly is where most advertisers go wrong—and spend far too much money on their campaigns.
It doesn’t have to be like that, though. You can follow the steps given in the PPC guide 2022 and execute your campaign accordingly.
You can launch an effective pay-per-click campaign with proper planning and execution that drives more traffic and leads with little risk.
Sometimes businesses that are not comfortable run pay per click campaigns on their own, outsource the work.
PPC services from Marketer can help in managing and running a successful campaign based on your budget and objectives.
