Tips on PPC Campaigns For Beginners

If you’re new to PPC, it may seem easy. Pick up a few keywords, write an ad, enter your credit card, and watch the sales roll in.

Contrarily, PPC requires nothing short of carefully calculated maneuvers. PPC campaigns are robust programs full of useful features for advertisers to maximize ROI and achieve business objectives.

The following are some beginner’s tips to get the best results from your PPC campaigns right away.

1. Bid on brand terms

A common PPC misconception is to assume that you don’t need to spend money bidding on your brand name because you already rank number one for your brand organically.

Even if it’s true that you rank number one, not everyone clicks on organic listings. But more importantly, the new trademark policies won’t prevent your competitors from bidding on your brand name.

While you can’t prevent your competitors from bidding on your brand, you can make sure your ad is there to take up a spot on the search engine results page.

2. Clean up ad groups

Take the time to set up several, tightly focused ad groups with highly relevant keywords. The data you collect on these ad groups will be far more relevant and actionable. You’ll know quickly which keywords and ads are working well and which aren’t so you can more easily optimize your campaign to improve performance.

What’s more, you’ll see better campaign performance from tightly coupled ad groups. Google will award you with higher Quality Scores, which will lower your Cost Per Click.

3. Use negative keywords

Negative keywords let you prevent your ads from being shown for searches containing that negative keyword term. For instance, if you’re selling software and don’t have a free offering, adding “-free” to your negative keyword list will prevent your ads from being served when a searcher enters “free software” into Google.

Leveraging negative keywords can simplify campaign management by making sure only the most relevant traffic comes to your site, which will improve your CTR and conversion rates, and reduce the “noise” in your data analysis by filtering out visitors who are unlikely to buy your product or service.

4. Leverage Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) is the practice of writing ads with variables, which will then populate with a user’s exact search term when the ad is served. When a user sees an ad with their exact search term included and bolded in the ad copy, they will be more likely to click your ad. Using dynamic keyword insertion can increase your click-through rate, which also improves your Quality Score.

The best part about using Dynamic Keyword insertion is that it’s simple to do, and will save you loads of time! Rather than writing a separate ad for every keyword in an ad group, DKI will give you the same effect with just one ad.

5. Use Ad Scheduling

Ad Scheduling, or day parting, lets you specify the times of day, or days of the week your ads will run. This can be particularly useful if you find that your customers convert on your web site during certain times of the day/week.

Of course, doing this manually multiple times per week would be a huge hassle, so AdWords makes it easy schedule when your ads run with Ad Scheduling. To determine the best times of day or days of the week to run your ads, look at your conversion data in Google Analytics. This will let you see when your site is generating the most conversion.

Don’t make too many changes in a short period of time. Get comfortable with the basics before trying any advanced features.

By working through these tips, you’ll be on your way to getting the best results you can from your PPC campaign.