Pay Per Click advertising can be a great way to drive traffic to your site but in the wrong hands, it can burn money. If you bid on the wrong keywords or focus on the wrong audience, you can end up spending a fortune without any measurable return. If you want to dip into the PPC landscape yourself, or work out if a PPC provider knows what they’re doing, consider these five essential stages of the process.

1. Audience. First up, determine your audience. Who will search for you? Who will click on your Adwords, Overture or other pay per click ads? Your PPC audience will be different from the ‘natural’ search audience, or from visitors you get from other channels. Dinkum takes this into account so that we can prepare the best keyword list and copy for your campaign.

2. Keywords. Next, select the ‘niche’ keywords that will deliver the most relevant traffic for the lowest cost. We start with our unique keyword mining process, drawing on both PPC and natural search databases to provide the best coverage. Then we prepare keyword lists that include terms, misspellings and plural/singular possibilities. To begin with, consider the three match types of each keyword:-

• Broad Match – Your ad will appear when a user searches for a variation of your keyword including synonyms. If your keywords are specific and unique to you, this is good because your net can be spread wide. But if your search terms can be confused or have many synonyms, you could end up with misdirected traffic. And that will cost you.
  Phrase Match – Your ad will appear when a user searches for your keyword, even if they’ve added a word before or after your search phrase. If your search phrase is “red wine stain”, it will also match “stain on carpet from red wine”.
  Exact Match – Your ad will only appear with the exact working of the keyword. If someone types in “red wine stain”, it will only match to that search.

Fortunately, you can experiment and see what kind of results you get for different search phrases. If they convert, it’s money well spent. But if they’re not relevant, you can adjust the terms.

3. Copy. Next, it’s important to craft relevant, well-written PPC ads that focus on each keyword group. By combining a clear, audience-focused call to action with the best keywords and phrase, we create the most effective PPC campaign. It’s also important to write different ads for different ad groups.

4. Setup. Establish your campaign on the PPC services that offer the best exposure to your audience. This is dependent on how your audience searches for you. At the same time, we install conversion tracking on your site so we can see how users respond and behave. This is crucial.

5. Measure and Adjust. Continuously track campaign performance for click-thru and conversion rates, and adjust each keyword group for the best performance. It’s an ongoing process but one that can yield significant rewards.

Pay per click can be a very effective way to drive traffic to your site. But attracting the right traffic takes strategy. If you’d like help setting up a campaign that’s effective and gets results, contact us now.

Photo Credit: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/315301