Small businesses often have a number of different campaigns they are working on in order to drum up business.
One such campaign is the pay-per-click campaign that companies deploy in order to boost their return on investment (ROI). Done correctly, it can be a big boost to your company’s ability to bring in some good revenue. Done incorrectly, however, it can lead to frustration and lessened returns.
If your PPC campaigns are not clicking, for lack of a better term, there are some steps you can take in order to kick-start your program.
Some things to keep in mind:
- Settle on objectives – The first and most important point is you need to define what your objectives are. Are you going into the campaign in order to produce new leads, pick up more site registrations, or promote your product/s and/or services? Clarify what your main objective is so everyone on your team is on the same page.
- Put in place the right keywords – Having the right keywords in place for your campaign is an often overlooked aspect. If you don’t find out which keywords consumers would use to reach your products and services, you are making a major mistake. With keyword research, you can determine which keywords allow you to move up in the listings and garner better visibility. If you’re unsure of how to attain the necessary keywords, there are different online tools to help you with this kind of research. The bottom line is the importance of being specific when creating various keywords and combining them to make sure the keywords are relevant to the ads that are available.
- Don’t be afraid of negative keywords – Although you may be hesitant to go negative, using negative keywords is not the end of the world. Such terms can prove beneficial to prevent you from paying for traffic that serves no purpose to you. Keep in mind that negative keywords are those terms that you do not want included with search engine result pages that promote your advertisement.
- Utilize Google AdWords – Remember that the campaign setting available through Google AdWords can be set to better manage your company’s campaigns and improve your goal of targeting audiences. With the right plan in place, you increase the chance of a higher return on investment as well as higher conversions.
- Deliver what you promised – One of the problems you can run into is not delivering what you say you will. In the event you have promised potential clients a specific item and/or reward with your ad, make sure you do just that and put together specific landing sites for this purpose.
- Matching up is important – Another key facet of a successful PPC campaign is making sure to match your advertising headline text with search terms. Failure to do so often means paying more for ads due to the fact that Google places no relevance on them. Never forget that individuals click on ad headlines that contain the precise keywords they were looking for in the first place.
- Optimization is important, too – You hurt your chances of a successful PPC campaign if you do not focus on optimization. You want to optimize your PPC bidding strategies around the performance of each keyword, meaning you want maximization on the amount of sales and leads at the lowest possible expense.
- Measures those results – Finally, just as you hopefully would with any project you embark on, make sure you measure the outcome of each campaign. Without comprehensive reports and analysis of those numbers, you fail to understand how your PPC campaigns are doing. Without measuring results, you cannot see where improvement is necessary and where success is taking form.
When all is said and done, each and every PPC campaign your company undertakes should provide results and be clearly defined and well executed.
Failure to successfully execute such programs means you and the company heads will most likely not be pleased with your ROI at the end of the day.
