Getting Started with Pay per Click Advertising

To follow on from our overview of pay per click advertising (or search advertising) in last month’s edition of Marketing Karma, we’re going to continue on the same theme over the next couple of months with a more comprehensive guide to setting up and managing a pay per click campaign.

So let’s get started – here are our top tips for setting up a pay per click campaign with the major search advertising platforms.

1. Don’t be Phased
Firstly and foremost, don’t be phased by the management interface that the pay per click campaigns provide. Google Adwords & Microsoft adCenter have all made their technology relatively easy to navigate and are very similar to each other. Yahoo! Search Marketing’s management interface has been rather cumbersome and not very user friendly, but they’re in the process of upgrading their whole management interface, making it much more user-friendly and similar to Google Adwords & Microsoft adCenter (to be called Yahoo! Panama). For really basic campaigns and for those of you who don’t want to get too involved in complicated campaigns, Google Adwords offer a starter program, which is very easy to use. If your campaign grows or you want more advanced settings, you can go on to transfer to their standard program.

2. What are you Advertising?
This may sound obvious, but the next step in the process is to work out exactly what you’re going to advertise. You’re going to need to structure your campaign so it’s probably easier to put pen to paper first. Decide which products or services you want to advertise, then group them into common themes. A good example of this is from a campaign I’ve done for one of my clients who sells home accessories. It also ties up quite nicely with the categories of the website. Each of the product areas was categorised into ‘dining accessories’, ‘kitchen accessories’, ‘bathroom accessories’, ‘garden accessories’ etc. You can do this with your products and services if there are common themes. Then categorise your products /services further. For example ‘dining accessories’ could be broken down into ‘glassware’, ‘dinner services’, ‘table linen’ etc. Then include all the possible keywords that relate to these sub-categories. When you set up your campaign, you’ll be using ‘campaigns’ and ‘ad groups’ (for Google Adwords in any case, and similar for Microsoft), so use your categories and sub categories in the same way.

3. Research your Keywords
After working out your categories & sub categories (if appropriate), then you need to do some keyword research. All of the main advertisers interfaces provide a search tool, but you might also want to do some additional keyword research on Wordtracker (or their free keyword suggestion tool if you don’t have a Wordtracker account). The most important thing to remember is not to sponsor keywords that are too general. If you do, you’ll probably find that these keywords will generate few clicks and either be expensive to sponsor, or your ad will be so far down the list that hardly anyone will ever see it! Be as specific and targeted as you can to keep costs down and to generate clicks from targeted customers.

4. Who are you Targeting?
You can’t be too exacting as to who you’re targeting with search advertising but the main advertising platforms give you location targeting and Microsoft’s adCenter also allows you to target demographically, i.e. gender and age, to Microsoft Passport users (those with Hotmail or MSN Web Messenger accounts). Google Adwords allows you to target as many countries as you want, and also at regional and town level, although this is done by IP address rather than physical address so you may find that someone who lives in Glasgow has an ISP based in London. Yahoo! Search Marketing previously only allowed you to set up accounts in individual countries that they operated in, although this may change with their new platform.

5. How much do you want to Spend?
Next, you need to work out how much you can actually afford to spend on clicks per month. Your budget probably depends on what you’re promoting and what kind of return you could expect from the campaign. If you’re in the financial services sector then you’ll need deep pockets as sponsoring anything to do with loans, mortgages & pensions is highly competitive and very expensive. Better news for those of you who are in other sectors, but still many service sectors are expensive, such as sales training, or products such as mobile phones, digital cameras etc. Google Adwords will give you an estimate as to how much you may need to spend each day to show your ads continually, but often their estimate can be quite high. Once you’ve decided on your budget for the month, divide this figure by 30 to work out your daily budget. Once you reach this daily budget in clicks, your ads will stop until the next day, so you don’t need to worry about it being used up at once. Your budget is not set in stone by any means, so you can change your mind whenever you want! You’ll need to allocate a daily budget to each ‘campaign’ that you set up, so if you have several campaigns in your account, divide your budget between them.

6. Target your Ads
When writing your ad text you need to be as precise as possible. The more precise, the more targeted your clicks will be. Unless you’re a well known brand, it’s not worth including your company name. Use the keywords you’re sponsoring as headlines, e.g Garden Accessories, and with the limited descriptions you get with Google & Microsoft adCenter, you’ll have to be specific. You get 35 characters per line including spaces, so no waffle allowed! Don’t just write one ad per campaign or ad group. Try out several different ads to test as some will no doubt perform better than others.

7. Where are you going to send your visitors?
As a final part of setting up your campaign, work out where you’re going to send your visitors from your ad. It’s important that you don’t just send everyone to your home page – if you’re targeting specific products or services then send them to that page of your site. If everyone goes to the home page and then has to find what they’re after, they’re not going to hang around for long. If your visitors are presented with a page featureing exactly what they’re looking for, then they’re more likely to convert into leads & sales. You don’t just have to rely on your existing web pages either – you could create specific landing pages for your campaign, particularly if you have special offers or are promoting products for those arriving specifically from the pay per click campaign. You can be as imaginative as you want. Remember, once you get the traffic to your website, it’s your website’s job to convert those prospects into customers.

This is just the beginning of handling your pay per click campaign. We’ve covered the most basic features to help you get going, and next we’ll look at the more advanced features offered by the advertising platforms. On a final note, before we forget, make sure you have a valid credit card to get the campaign started!