Before the start of a campaign it is essential to define its goal. This goal could be site exposure, traffic, email registrations, bookings, orders, revenue or a combination of these.
With these goals in mind it becomes easier to measure performance and extrapolate daily figures to ensure that you are on target to reaching your desired return on investment (ROI).
Designing for Personas
Looking at personas is an important part of creating your campaign. A persona illustrates a typical person within each of your customer segments. For a typical cosmetics site, one persona could be, Jill 24, web designer, single who is looking for big branded makeup, another could be Mary 46, housewife, mother of two looking for anti-aging products. With all of these personas in mind it becomes easier to create adverts that are targeted and will be more compelling to a particular persona.
Stage in Buying Process
Depending on the type of product you sell there are a number of stages that a consumer will go through to make a purchasing decision. For example, the amount of research done on a car before purchase is different to branded cosmetics purchases.
Consequently, it is important to create adverts that are orientated to the customer's stage in the buying process. A discount or buy now to save 50% will be a much more effective campaign if the consumer is in the final stages of purchasing, whilst an early stage product researcher is going to be more interested in objective reviews or ratings.
Geo-targeting
You can target your PPC adverts by country based on the geographical regions your site operates. You should localize your adverts as much as possible and track the results from each regional campaign.
Age, Gender Targeting
The latest PPC engines, in particular MSN, also allow targeting by age and gender. This enables you to target each advert based on your target persona.
Keyword Selection
Keyword analysis is an important element of any PPC activity and focuses on creating a list of the most relevant keywords to bid on. Each PPC engine has keyword selection tools that help you identify keywords and keyword combinations to bid on.
These tools also give you an estimation of traffic for particular keywords. Using your site conversion data and these traffic figures you can get a prediction on the sales you will generate.
There is considerable competition on popular keywords and therefore a higher cost per click, so it is important to select the broadest list of keywords to ensure that you have a lowest average cost per click. Each of the PPC engines has its own nuances and provides options to ensure either exact matches of bidding terms or partial matches on searched keywords.
Make sure that all the keywords options are considered as things like broad matching on keywords like 'flight' would make your advert appear every time 'flight' was searched in any keyword combination. For instance, even searches for 'flight arrivals information' would bring up your advert whilst searches for 'flight Dubai' may be relevant you would end up paying a higher bid cost than bidding directly for the keyword combination 'flight Dubai'.
In addition, to the keywords you bid on you can also set up negative keywords for which you would like your adverts to not appear for, making sure that you increase your relevancy. For instance, you could have added 'arrivals' as a negative keyword to ensure that your advert did not appear for 'flight arrivals information.
Action Steps Before Starting Your Pay-Per-Click Advertising Campaign
1. Before the start of a campaign it is essential to define its goal.
2. Create adverts that are orientated to the customer's stage in the buying process.
3. Select the broadest list of keywords to ensure that you have a lowest average cost per click.
Important Points Before Starting Your Pay-Per-Click Advertising Campaign
- Looking at personas is an important part of creating your campaign.
- Targeting by age and gender enables you to target each advert based on your target persona.
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