Seven Steps to Building a New PPC Campaign
If you are new to search or just want to tackle a new paid search campaign, here are seven steps to take.
If you are new to search or just want to tackle a new paid search campaign, here are seven steps to take.
Many of you may have already developed a PPC (define) campaign from scratch, but for those of you who are new to search, it can sometimes be daunting to know where to start. With that in mind, today’s column will focus on the seven key steps to building a PPC campaign.
Step “zero” – which you should have already done if you’ve decided to develop a PPC campaign – is to do your research. My last column talked about the various intelligence tools you can use to understand the search marketplace and competitive environment. All of this should feed into your overarching search strategy.
However, even more important than understanding the landscape is to have an in-depth knowledge of your company’s or clients’ products and services and their Web site content. And naturally, that’s where the PPC campaign creation process starts!
If you are developing a campaign for a new site launch, you can use the content map or Information Architecture (IA) wireframes and copy decks to help understand how content will be organized and what types of themes will be present.
In addition, if the category or offering is completely new to you, it may be helpful to do additional research on the topic to broaden your general knowledge based on the topic. These efforts should leave you with my next point.
For example, if you are working with a Web site for a home renovation company, you may find the following key content areas/themes:
Based on the relative importance of the topics in this list, you may decide to assign a budget proportionately to each of these areas.
Your goal is to discover as many related terms, keyword variations, synonyms, related terms, and misspellings as you can. With paid search, you start with a big list of keywords for testing purposes and then whittle down your list as you find what is working and what’s not.
It might make sense to tackle each key content theme/topic individually and capture the output of that research on individual tabs in a spreadsheet. This will come in handy when we move to the next step.
Within each of these ad groups would be highly focused keywords in close relation to each other. There is no set number of recommended ad groups or keywords within each ad group, but the smaller and tighter each ad group is, the better.
In addition to regular match types, you can also assign negative matches to each of your ad groups. “Negative” keywords are essentially terms that you don’t want your ad showing for. So, for example, if you put all your keywords on broad match, anytime the word “home renovation” is part of a keyword phrase, your ad would show up. Which means it could also show for undesirable queries such as “horrible home renovation” or “home reno companies to avoid.” To avoid your brand being associated with these terms, you can added such keywords as “negative” terms to your account, which restricts your ad from showing in those instances.
What’s most important is that you make sure your ad copy is as relevant to the keywords as possible. So, for example, in your “modern bathroom reno group,” you might explicitly state in an ad that your company “specializes in creating stylish bathrooms with a modern aesthetic.” In your “retiling shower” group, you might ask, “Thinking about retiling your shower? Learn how a professional contractor can help.”
For each ad group, your goal is to find the page on the site that is most relevant to the group’s keywords. In some instances you may choose to promote a specific “call-to-action” in your ads and therefore drive directly to an action page. You might also want to create campaign landing pages to up your chances of conversion. You can also test drive the same ad to various landing pages to see which generates a more engaged visitor.
Julie is off today. This column was originally published on March 1, 2010 on ClickZ.