Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
Setup and Management Services
Ever wondered what is involved in setting up and maintaining an effective pay-per-click campaign? Here's an overview.
- First we pick keywords and find out what they'll cost. We've worked out some tactics for PPC keyword research that help to streamline this task so that it doesn't become a huge time sink, but the time involved is more or less relative to the size of campaign.
- Next comes writing effective ads. This is an interesting challenge, to pack a marketing wallop into a 25 character headline and two 35 character descriptive lines. Also, the way the ad is composed will affect how much a click will cost! Google has its own mathematically determined "opinions" about ad relevance, and not satisfying them can double the keyword price! It's best to start out with several ads and see which ones are most cost-effective and results-effective.
- Now we set up the actual campaigns. The strategy here is to set up Campaigns and Ad Groups as a logical structure that will be easy to maintain over time. It needs to be granular enough to provide valuable feedback on the effectiveness of each ad and keyword. That will be essential to tuning the campaigns for maximum performance and minimum cost.
- The most important part of setting up a PPC campaign is linking it in with Web Analytics so that we can analyse the quality of the traffic that comes from each individual ad / keyword. Concidentally, this also turns out to be *the* most effective means for researching keywords for organic SEO!
- After the campaigns are all set up and the ads begin to run, there is a phase of tuning the campaigns to peak performance. Some ads may be best confined to run in specific geographical areas. Some keywords should be run with "broad match" which will make the ads show up for a wide variety of related terms, while others should be forced to respond only to the specific phrase. For some keywords, targeting AdSense ads (the ads that go on websites) will be cost-effective, while others will produce far better results if the ads are run only on actual search results pages. Finally there is the option of targeting ads to run on specific selected sites for a flat rate per thousand "impressions" rather than a per-click cost.
If you are on a tight budget you'll want to learn how to do all of that so that you can set up and manage your pay-per-click campaigns yourself. For everyone else there's ROI Web Solutions.
So how much will it cost to have all this done for you? The cost of setting up the actual campaigns could vary a great deal. We have proprietary software tools that make quick work of setting up individual keyword tracking for web analytics, and we know how to use the data from web analytics to tune your PPC campaigns for the best ROI. We recommend that you allocate a minimum of $2500 to spend over the first two to three months for campaign setup and monitoring. After that the cost goes down radically. Maintaining a really well set up campaign over time only takes a few hours per month. If you'd like, we can teach you how to do it yourself.
Beyond that, you need to decide how much to allocate to the actual cost of advertising. If your budget is less than, say, $700/month to spend on clicks then we would question whether PPC is really right for you at all.
And finally, we will mention the very FIRST question you need to ask before embarking on a PPC campaign. What is the value of a new customer, and how many customers can you actually serve per month (your fulfillment capacity)? That's going to put a cap on your maximum achievable income. Spending a lot of money to bring in traffic you cannot even handle would not be cost-effective!
Regardless of your budget, it is crucial to have the feedback of Web Analytics that can show what people did after they clicked through. That feedback will tell us what we need to know about keyword choice, ad effectiveness, geographic targeting, ad venue targeting, and matching strategies. Even more importantly it will tell you how effective the website itself is at converting visitors to customers.
If you believe that pay-per-click advertising may be right for your business, talk to us about how to get the maximum ROI out of it.
