A Beginner's Guide to Launching a Killer Pay Per Click Campaign

How can you launch a pay per click campaign that generates revenue for your business?Businesses collectively invest billions of dollars in pay per click campaigns. It's widely seen as an effective way to increase revenue immediately and to launch new products. It's also a way to generate revenue while other forms of marketing take time to build momentum.Pay per click advertising is popular and effective because advertisers only pay when someone clicks on their ad. That may sound great, but there are a lot of things in the process that has to line up perfectly to convert that click. Otherwise, you're wasting money.Read on to learn how you can build an effective pay per click campaign.

What is Your Marketing Goal?

The very first thing you need to do when starting a PPC campaign is to define your goal. If you were to get a lot of traffic to your landing page, what do you want them to do?Sample goals are to drive brand awareness, build subscribers, increase product sales, or launch a new product.You need to understand why you're running the campaign and what you want to achieve because that goal will drive the entire process.

Do Your Research

A pay per click campaign is more than running a small ad to your website. You need to understand the psychology of the person that's clicking on the ad.If you don't have them already, now is the time to create buyer personas of your customers. This will help you come up with a list of preliminary keywords that they use to search for your products or services.Don't forget to include your brand name, too. If you have enough brand equity and people are familiarity with your brand, they will search for it.

Validate Demand with Keyword Research

After you develop that list of initial keywords, you want to make sure that people are using them to search.This is where you use tools like Google's Keyword Research tool. You want to make sure that your keywords have a lot of volume, and they have some competition.

Setup Your Campaign Structure

You're now ready to take your keywords and create a structure around those keywords. You can create groups of keywords that fit into a similar category. For example, your categories for keywords related to running shoes might be brand keywords (Nike, Adidas, Puma), generic terms (sneakers, training shoes, running shoes), and related terms (running gear, running tips, sportswear).You'll also want to visit this guide we wrote for a more in-depth look at setting up your AdWords campaign structure.[caption id="attachment_21743" align="aligncenter" width="600"]

Check out WordStream for some more awesome Google Ads strcuture guide.[/caption]

Set Your Budget

Setting your budget is like reverse engineering. You know the keywords that people are using to search for your products or services. You know the average cost per click for those keywords.You have to ask yourself two additional questions:

• Can you afford that keyword?
• How much are you willing to spend per click?

You'll also need to be able to estimate your conversion rates and the profit from each conversion. After all, you don't want to create a campaign that loses money.

Craft Killer Ad Copy

Ad copy is part art, part science. People expect advertising to communicate value and to speak to the needs and interest of your target market.Remember that buyer persona you drew up at the beginning of the process? It's time to look at that again.You have a little space to get their attention and you certainly don't want to mention being the least expensive product. That will draw the wrong kind of customer to your business.You can mention how your product saves time or gives them confidence.Of course, don't forget the call to action. You have to tell them what to do, whether it's get something, buy something or sign up.

Create a Landing Page That Converts

One of the biggest mistakes that PPC beginners make is that they drive all of the traffic they paid for to the home page of their business.That's great that you're driving traffic to your site, but your home page isn't going to tell people what they do when they get there.That's why you need to set up a landing page specific to that campaign. When someone sees your ad, it's probably the very first interaction with your business. They click on your ad, and you need a landing page geared towards conversions.A good landing page should validate the user's click. In other words, it should be a seamless experience between your ad and the landing page. It also needs to be relevant to the keywords you selected, as that will raise your ad's quality score.Your landing page needs to load fast because your conversions can drop by as much as 7% per second delay.[caption id="attachment_21742" align="aligncenter" width="600"]

A good example of a high-converting landing page from Shopify.[/caption]

Test Everything

Keep in mind that your campaign won't be perfect from the beginning. There's always room to improve and increase conversions.The key to testing is that you want to contrast and compare only one element at a time. If you make too many changes at once, you won't know what works and what doesn't.Things that you might want to test are the ad headline, ad copy, landing page headline, landing page visuals, and calls to action.

Scale Your Campaign

Once your campaign is running effectively, you can scale your campaign up. You already have proof that your landing page works, and your ad copy works.Once you have that validation, you can scale your campaign up. You can invest in product listing ads, try YouTube ads, and Gmail ads.Remarketing is another powerful advertising method to incorporate in your campaign, too. Remarketing reaches out to people across the web as they browse websites or their social media who visited your landing page but didn't convert. This is a great way to build awareness also increase your conversions.[caption id="attachment_21741" align="aligncenter" width="600"]

Example of a Remarketing ad for Frank & Oak.[/caption]

Pay Per Click Campaign That Generates Revenue

There are a lot of pieces to running a pay per click campaign. You have to make sure you know your audience, use the right keywords, write great copy, and have a landing page geared towards conversions.While a PPC campaign isn't a magic bullet that will solve all of your problems, it can be a revenue generator if you have the patience and willingness to test and improve upon your work.That's how you get great results with pay per click campaigns.If you want help with your next Google AdWords campaign, schedule a free digital marketing consultation today.