7 Tips to Launch Successful PPC Campaigns

Posted by Madhav Tripathi | Posted in Online Marketing | Posted on 10-01-2010

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This is a guest post from Raj Barr, he is a freelance writer and mainly writes on PPC, Conversion Rate Optimization, Web 2.0 and Affiliate Marketing.
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PPC Campaigns are being widely used by internet marketers and business owners of all levels because of their capability to send high quality relevant traffic to a website, but to make them successful and to achieve positive ROI from it require lot of attention and research especially when you are working in niche having really tough competition. In this article I am going to cover some of the tips which can help you to make your PPC campaigns more successful.

Start with Small- If you are New to PPC then you should not bid on most expensive keywords related to your industry. Start with the cheap keywords to get an idea about the quality of traffic you get from it. Measure the results and use that data to tweak your site architecture and search queries you want to target. In this way, you would get proper idea of your industry and about the quality of your landing pages without costing you a lot of money.

Create Keyword List- PPC is all about targeting right keywords at the right time and location. You can create a great keyword list for your campaigns with the help of Free Tools like Google Adwords or by using Paid tools like WordTracker. The most accurate way to get a high Quality keyword list is to generate it on the basis of results derived from Small PPC Campaigns as discussed earlier.

Proper Targeting - If you want to target multiple locations in your campaign then create Separate ad campaign for each location. Divide keywords you want to target in each campaign tightly in to multiple ad groups. Each ad group should contain only highly relevant keywords and create Customized ad copy for each ad group. You can add up to 2000 ad groups in one campaign.

Customized Ad Copy - Create ads which are relevant to the search query and keywords you are targeting. If you are running an international campaign then take care of semantic changes which you need to make in your ad copy due to different locations. For e.g. – In US, people use “Airplane” but in UK people use”Aeroplane”. Analyze the ad copies of local advertisers when creating your own ad copy. You need to understand that the ad copy which works better in US, could be considered as irrelevant in UK because of the language and Cultural differences.

Landing Pages - Traffic you get from PPC Campaigns is always looking for specific things so always direct them to highly relevant landing pages. Use similar keywords you had used in ad copy in the title and body of your landing pages so that visitors can feel that they are at right place. In case you are running multiple offers at the same time then it is always recommended to create separate landing page for each offer so that each landing page can focus only one offer and your visitors don’t get confused with multiple offers.

Make sure that your landing page contains unique content which is useful for your visitors. Place your call to action link above the fold so that your users can see it easily. Avoid using of obtrusive elements like flash, frames, pop-ups etc to reduce the loading time of your landing pages. High Quality landing pages not only improve user experience and conversion rate of your campaign but it would also improve your Adwords Quality score for each keyword which will reduce the overall CPC of your keywords.

Avoid Broad Match - Do not Select Broad Match for the keywords in your campaigns. Broad Match option would allow Google to run your ads for all variations of your keywords. For e.g- If you are targeting keyword “Dell Computer”, then under Broad Match your advertisements could be shown for informational search queries like “What is the customer care number of Dell Computers?” . Broad Match can increase the volume of traffic but have very low conversion rate. Always go for either Phrase Match option or Exact Match Option.

Keep on Testing - PPC campaign always have a scope of improvement in then and sometimes small tweaks like changing title a bit can make big differences. So always keep on testing and tweaking your PPC campaigns and continue with strategies which work better as compared to others.