During my first week of working for INVESP, I was assigned the task of running a PPC campaign for some of the writing services we offer.  Eager to get started and impress my employers I accepted this project thinking “how hard can it possibly be?”  This blog is for all of you out there, who like me can use all the guidance available while running your PPC campaign!

I think it’s very important to understand why PPC is a great marketing tool that can significantly increase our business.  As you all know, running a PPC campaign can greatly help increase traffic to your site as well as lead potential prospects there.  It’s the hottest method these days and of course as a part of a relatively new business it was important for me to know everything about it. 

So what is it exactly? I was surprised to find out that it was a form of online marketing that everyone is exposed to whether they realize it or not.  Each time a searcher enters a word or phrase into the search field and clicks, the engine returns hundreds, thousands sometimes millions of results.  At the top of these results pages are always the sponsored listings, which are of course the Pay Per Click ads.  So you can see the benefit of being on the top of the results page of what your targeted user has searched for.  Logic and numerous studies tell us that users are most likely to click on what they see first rather than go through numerous pages trying to find what they’re looking for.

This puts extreme importance on keyword selection.  We have to find numerous variations of the same keyword to decide which ones we will bid on.  Yes, I said “bid” because PPC is essentially an auction.  You and who knows how many others are required to bid on certain keywords to run your ad.  The benefit of this is that this means a relatively low cost for marketing smaller businesses, who are often constrained by budgeting issues. 

I read a quick briefing of what the process entailed: coming up with keywords, running some excel sheets to figure out which had the best KEI, choosing a keyword, coming up with an ad, creating the landing page, designing the web copy…. Didn’t seem too difficult… This was probably the biggest mistake I made in the beginning which caused our PPC campaign to drag over 2 months and still not be launched rather than taking the estimated month from start to finish. 

It’s critical that you are as prepared as possible before even deciding which keywords to use.  Understand thoroughly what PPC entails before jumping into it and realizing that you’ve done things wrong and have to start over.  We went back and forth with coming up with keywords for over 3 weeks when it should probably only take 1 week to complete!  There are numerous resources available online, such as this blog ? to find information about running a PPC campaign.  I can’t emphasize enough the importance of researching before beginning!

After thoroughly studying the PPC process, you will realize that selecting your keywords is the first and most important step in the PPC campaign. Next week I will give you a detailed description of what the best way to selecting keywords is.