Here at Bough Digital, we understand that you might have several reasons for wanting to try out a PPC campaign, whether this is using Google AdWords to try and bring traffic to your homepage or a service like Outbrain to target specific pieces of content as landing pages.
What do you need to do to plan and manage a PPC campaign?
It pays to have one clear objective in mind when you begin to kick off your PPC planning. Even if you’re intending to use the results of the campaign for keyword planning and helping out with landing page optimisation in the future, as well as many other things, you should have one primary objective for your PPC campaign.
The most obvious objective when starting a PPC campaign is to achieve sales, given that you’re paying for every visitor that comes to your website. However, some businesses are prepared to make an investment into PPC with an eye on making gains in other areas.
A website might have a strong call to action on its homepage that involves signing up for something or inspires a visitor to make an enquiry without making an outright sale.
A website might be advertising a product launch and wants to grow awareness with a relevant audience.
Both of those examples would be relevant to businesses that have a well-designed site but don’t have the organic search presence that they’d like to have.
Once you know your objectives, it is time to see if your site is ready for all the new traffic headed your way.
Before you start your campaign, having completed the plan you then need to check that everything is set up on your site to ensure you’re geared up to achieve maximum return on investment (ROI) from your PPC advertising.
These checks will always be related to your objectives. What you look for if you’re trying to raise awareness of a product launch is likely to be different to what you’ll assess if you want to inspire enquiries.
What the next stage is when a visitor completes the action you want them to complete. If this is an action on a specific page, such as filling out a form, where is the visitor redirected once they’ve completed it?
If the action is to buy, how obvious is the action and how easy is it to do?
How you keep people on a specific page if the aim is simply brand awareness; if you just want one-page visits you’ll have a high bounce rate, what other metrics will you need to keep in mind?
The best thing to is to get someone in your company – if you’re unable to be self-critical yourself without affecting your motivation – to start at the PPC landing page and see what they do. Get feedback on how they found the site, and use these findings to make tweaks before your campaign goes live.
The final aspect of the planning stage is to consider what you want to spend on your PPC campaign. Again, this should sit alongside your objectives for the whole campaign. Rather than think about it in terms of cost per click right from the off, put a whole budget figure on it and then go from there.
Remember to think about the type of return that you want to see. If you’re trying to sell then spending more per click for better leads will be fine. Alternatively, you may be targeting leads or brand awareness, as already mentioned, so you might decide to spend less on clicks as you won’t be seeing any immediate return.
Ultimately, what you spend will depend on your own objectives as well as how long you’re willing to wait to see a return. For example, if you’re comfortable spending additional sums on your PPC knowing you might not see any real return until a product as launched or you’ve followed up on all enquiries you receive, then by all means take this approach.
As with many aspects of digital marketing, if you want to be successful with your PPC campaign, the key is to ensure you take the time to construct a great plan and truly understand what you’re looking to achieve.
If you’re struggling to set PPC objectives for your business, contact Bough Digital now or check out our approach to PPC to learn more about how we can help your business to realise positive results from a paid online campaign.
Categories · Search Engine Optimisation.
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