7 March 2013

Social Media

Tips For A Successful PPC Campaign

After talking about common PPC mistakes in my previous blog, this blog looks at some PPC tips to help try and make your ad campaign a hit.

Utilise Google ACE

Google ACE (AdWords Campaign Experiments) is a professional tool that allows you to see the estimated performance of your campaign by indicating the predicted success of your PPC adverts when the settings are personalised to your campaign.

Whilst this is a great tool, Google ACE does not take into account side vs. top ad locations. With this in mind, the results given from the tool should always only be used as a guide as opposed to a guarantee.

Split test your ads

In order to successfully assess where your ad would be best positioned, it is advisable to run 2 identical adverts simultaneously – assigning one ad with a higher cost per click to achieve a higher ranking position, and one with a lower budget to see which one gets the most traffic in relation to the cost per click – bear in mind that an ad with a higher CPC may be getting more clicks as it is a better position, but if it does not create a return that covers this cost, you may be better placing your ad in a lower position which will incur less clicks but as a price that is covered by the revenue it brings in.

Give your audience what they want to read

Split testing your ads can also be used to test the wording of your advert by injecting the same amount of money into 2 ads which are promoting the same product or service, but worded in a different way. For instance, if you are an eCommerce store, do your customers want to know that you offer “free shipping” or would they be more drawn in by “next day delivery”? Whilst this can hold a lot of value, it should be considered that the results may not always be completely accurate as, obviously, both adverts cannot be shown in the same position at the same time (or even in the same search results at the same time) which may affect the results of this test.

Label your campaigns

By utilising the Google AdWords feature – AdWords labels – you are able to add labels to all of your PPC campaigns, ad groups, keywords and individual adverts. Once you have correctly labelled all aspects of your PPC campaign, you can separate all of the ads that are designed to promote one product or service from the adverts that are intended to address a different product or service.

By Sarah-Jayne