Introduction to PPC campaigns: Keyword Selection

What is a PPC campaign?

Pay Per Click AdwordsPay per Click is a marketing solution provided by some of the major search engines and other companies. We are going to discuss about the most common of them, the Google AdWords service.

A pay per click campaign is a communication tool which serves ads in the Google Search Engine Results Page (SERPS) as a result of a search query or as a displayed ad in Google’s content network.

There are 3 different formats of Google Ads: text, image and video ads.

In this article we will focus on the text ads and particularly on the keyword selection.

Why do I need to run a PPC campaign?

Before starting a pay per click campaign you must define your goals.

Depending on your objectives you can use AdWords in order to achieve various goals such as increasing the sales of your products and services, subscribing more users to your service, collect emails for your e-mail marketing campaign, promote new products etc. For advanced users AdWords could be a communication tool for Crisis Management or an effective channel that delivers the proper messages to the correct users.

PPC Cost and Campaign Performance

After defining your goals you need to decide the budget and the other in-house assets you are going to use for the campaign.

The cost of an Adwords campaign depends on how effective your ads are. You should choose your keywords based on their relevance, popularity and price. Then Google will serve your ads under the related queries or pages. Keep in mind that you get charged when a visitor clicks on your ad text and not every time your ad appears.

A PPC campaign is cost effective when you have high conversions coming from these clicks. An important but not the only, indicator to measure your PPC performance is the click through rate (CTR) which is the number of clicks divided by the number of times your ad was delivered.

The Keywords of Ad and Landing Page

Generally people search for products, services, news and other interesting content. You can help them reach your site by displaying your adtext (impressions) near the search results, under specific and targeted queries. Keywords selection is the first step that will lead traffic to your website in order to meet your goals (clicks). A well written and attractive copy text will bring your customer through your door, and then a landing page with a crystal clear message and a hard call to action will achieve the desirable conversion.

The Keyword Selection

The process is easy but it is important to pay attention on the details in order to avoid mistakes that could seriously harm your wallet.

Start by identifying your target audience. Then create a wide list of relevant keywords of your product or service. You can use various tools for that, such as the AdWords Keyword Tool and the Wordtracker. These tools can help you get keyword combinations ideas and data for the effectiveness of each keyword. Pay attention to this step because the PPC campaign success or failure is highly depended on this step. Keywords must be relevant to your content, in other words tell exactly what you offer and describe your value proposition. Start with some generic keywords if your target is the brand awareness; be more specific with targeted keywords when you want to achieve sales from this campaign. Note that competitive keywords are more expensive and probably more generic instead of the targeted ones.

Stay tuned as more articles about PPC and SEM strategies will be publish within the next weeks.

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