A successful PPC campaign isn’t something you just whip together in a few minutes. You need to have goals established, a budget to work with, and a plan to deliver a ROI. There are some questions that you need to answer before you set out to build your pay per click campaign.
What is Your Budget?
You need to know how much you can, or how much you are willing to spend on PPC. Some businesses will have a strict monthly budget, while others will have a seemingly endless budget, provided the campaign is delivering a ROI. For the sake of creating your PPC campaign you need to establish a budget to work with, both on a monthly and daily basis. A wide open budget can be very hard to measure and keep on track. Remember, you can always scale a winning campaign, so start with a manageable budget and increase it as you have hard data proof that the campaign is performing well and delivering a solid ROI.
Create an Overall Budget
What is your business willing to spend monthly for all of your PPC activities? It is important that you set a monthly budget to work with, and create your campaigns around the set budget. It is important to understand that PPC is a learning experience. It can take some time to gather data and optimize the campaign so that it delivers a return. Businesses that spend money that they can’t afford to lose — or they are set up a PPC campaign dependent on it being successful are setting themselves up for failure. Only budget what you can afford to lose in the beginning, unless you have a professional PPC agency handle your campaign from the start.
Divide Your Budget Between Networks
AdWords is the PPC network that many businesses turn to, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other alternatives as well. There are traffic and conversion opportunities across several advertising networks and the only way to find out if they will be good for your business is to test them. Allocate your budget across several PPC networks in the beginning and begin to eliminate those that don’t produce and move the budget into those that do.
Budget by Goal
All of your PPC goals, whether product sales or actions such as a completed contact form or lead submission are not all equal. You need to budget your campaign between your conversion goals as well. Are you looking to mainly generate leads with PPC? If so, then the majority of your budget should be allocated for that goal. Do you sell multiple products online and you want to sell the ones that generate the most revenue? If so, then the majority of the budget should be applied to that goal.
The great thing about PPC is that you can start small, and increase your budget as you figure out how to build a winning campaign. PPC has a steep learning curve, and one mistake many businesses make is starting with a huge budget without having any experience. They quickly blow through the budget with no results to show, which discourages them and they swear off PPC. Get your feet wet with a smaller budget first and increase your budget as you begin to see a return.
What Are Your Goals?
Even though anyone can set up a PPC campaign in AdWords instantly, it doesn’t mean that the process should be rushed. Of course Google is going to make it very simple to set up a campaign — they want you to spend money! Without identifying specific goals you are wasting money and time.
Give Your Campaign Direction
Defining what benchmarks will make your PPC campaign successful gives you a foundation to build on. You will have to establish conversion goals as well. Knowing what your end goal is allows you to create a plan to reach that destination.
Hold Yourself Accountable
The only way to ensure that your campaign performs as expected is to hold yourself accountable. Are you not meeting your conversion goals? Is your cost per conversion too high? You know what you need to accomplish your PPC goals, so the only way you are going to reach them is to take control and make changes to get back on track.
Remain Focused
Setting your goals gives you something to focus on. Maintaining a specific cost per click, click through rate, and conversion rate will all contribute to the overall success of your PPC effort. You can’t simply set up a PPC campaign and let it run without constantly diving into the data and making changes. In order to be successful you need to stay focused and always have the end goal in mind.
You have to know what direction you want your campaign to go from the beginning and you also need to know what needs to happen in order to reach the end goal. If you don’t know this before you start then your campaign is doomed from the beginning.
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