Setting up your PPC campaigns (pay-per-click / banner ads / text ads) for maximum ROI, here’s a must do… do-diligence for all PPC advertisers.

Follow these eight steps on a consistent basis, and measure your success. Skipping one of these steps will ultimately lead to your advertising campaigns failure and loss of revenue.

Here’s the 8 Steps To PPC success :

1. Product Inventory/Research
2. Establish Objectives/Budget
3. Research Competition
4. Research Market
5. Build Keyword Pool
6. Go Wide, Then Deep
7. Keyword Tracking vs Conversion (ROI)
8. Purge & Split Test

1. Product Inventory/Research: The first up is the one step that is most often skipped by most novice advertisers. What I mean by establishing a product inventory or research is you want to consider all the features and benefits of your product or offer.

You need to answer three basic questions: Why should I care? What’s in it for me? Why should I believe you?

Simply listing features of the product is not going to convert into a sale. For example: “Receive instant text messages from friends and loved ones” is better than “The cell phone has text messaging”. The first phrase states a benefit while the second phrase only states a feature.

So, list all the benefits in writing. What can this product or offer really deliver to the customer? What sets your offer apart from other offers or products in the same market?

2. Establish Objectives/Budget: In order to get anywhere you need some kind of map. On that map you need to know where you are and where you want to go.

Many advertisers forget to establish objectives and budgets.  And when they launch a campaign they quickly began veering off course, ultimately wasting time and money - getting no where.

Establishing clear objectives like: What is my CTR (click through rate)? Which keywords are giving me the most conversion (sales)? How much am I paying for each keyword? Which keywords are costing money? How much am I willing to spend on each keyword? When will you know when to pull your campaign?

Write the answers to these questions down. And match your campaign results with your initial goals and objectives.

3. Research Competition: Before starting a campaign consider what your competition is up to. What keywords are they using? What products do they offer? What ads are they using? How long have they been advertising?

Why reinvent the wheel? Your competition may have already found a winning formula or you may be able to spot where their weaknesses are in their own marketing campaign.

Write this down in your marketing journal as well. And use it to establish a starting point and improve from there.

4. Research Market: The great thing about social media is it allows you to spy on the mindset of your market. Research social media and discover what your audience really thinks about your product or offer.

Understand the mindset of your market will help you craft an offer and your advertising to exploit the benefits of your product.

5. Build Keyword Pool : By compiling all the elements we just talked about above - between your objectives, your competitive research and understand the mindset of your market.  Start brainstorming about keywords that your market might type into the engines to look for your particular product or service or offer. Ask other people what they would type to look for your product or offer. You may be surprised at the number of different combination of words that can be established.  If you just dig a little deeper and discover all the different variations on words.

Use some keyword research tools such as Google’s external keyword tool and many others, to harvest keywords.

Evaluating Search Terms:

Use a balance of four criteria to evaluate potential search terms:

Relevance
Cost
Popularity
Performance

Relevance: Relevance is not just making sure that a search term can apply to your product or service but, more specifically, that it is unlikely to apply to any other product or service.

Cost: In a competitive market, you may often find that the top bid for a search term is far higher than your own margins allow. In general, you can attain far better value by choosing more specific search terms.

Popularity: Popularity is simply the relative usage of one search term over another. People searching for a product may often be more likely to use certain words than others in their search request, e.g. ‘buy’ and ‘purchase’ may mean the same thing but people are generally much more likely to use the word ‘buy’ than ‘purchase’ when searching.

Performance: Performance is something you will have to determine for yourself by tracking your customers from initial referral through to the sale. You will often find that while some search terms will generate more visitors, others will actually generate more sales. This is because many people will simply be researching a potential purchase while those who are ready to buy will use slightly different search terms.

6. Go Wide, Then Deep: The biggest mistake new PPC advertisers make is that they either put all their keywords into one ad group or they drill down deep into one keyword without first testing wider search terms.

Now that you have a couple hundred keywords related to your offer, start breaking them up into groups of keywords that are related by base terms or mindsets. Ask yourself which one of these keyword groups has more relevance, has more popularity and/or has the best performance versus costs? Use your competitive research to give you some insights which keywords has the most probability of being successful. Set that as your benchmark and then work from there.

And then take these groups of keywords and establish those as ad campaigns in your PPC campaign. Develop ads that relate to your keywords and also relate to your offer. Your ads should contain some qualifications that would eliminate some of the potential click throughs on your ads.  Also don’t use words like “free” in your ads, because it attracts the wrong mindset & wrong type of customers to your paid offers (even if it is a free report, that upsells into a paid offer) .

So start wide and then go deep into the keyword - only after the keyword group show indicators of performance.  The next step will tell you what performance  indicators to look for.

7. Keyword Tracking vs Conversion (ROI): Not establishing tracking in your PPC campaign is the death of your campaign. Without tracking how would you know which keywords are performing and which ones are just wasting your money. This waste of money will eventually eat up your profits. Find them early and find them fast.

In the old days (2 years ago) advertisers would have to create sub IDs for each keyword and then track those with an Excel spreadsheet. But thanks to inventions like Stats Junky this process of tracking keywords and conversion is all done for you at a click of a button.

8. Purge & Split Test: Do NOT get stuck in the trap of a bidding war, unless you know for sure that your keyword is going to return an ROI. But you have to know your own numbers and the lifetime value of your customer in order to establish a positive ROI.

But if the keyword is getting a couple hundred clicks and not converting into a sale then you may want to consider purging that keyword from your list. Or at least moving it to a different ad group and testing a different ad with that particular keyword.

Even if you find a high performing keyword always split test your ads and try to improve on your last benchmark.

In conclusion, use the eight steps above on a consistent basis and you’ll end up with high performing keyword campaigns that will gain you a high ROI on your advertising dollar. Failure to establish a system will result in lost revenue and little to NO success .

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Tags: Pay Per Click, Pay per click marketing, pay per click training, PPC, Sales Tsunami Bonus

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 3:58 am and is filed under Industry News, Marketing Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.