PPC Campaign Setup

Each search engine will have a slightly different process for how to setup PPC campaigns. You will find that once you complete this step once, the process is very similar on all the other search engines. We recommend you start with Google as there are industry standard tools that allow you to duplicate the campaign on the other search engines such as Yahoo & Bing using free tools such as Adwords Editor or paid 3rd party paid tools as SpeedPPC and others.

The first step is to create an account within the PPC section of Google called Google Adwords. Once you account is created and your can begin the process of creating the ads using the effective ad writing best practices mentioned on other pages of this site. You should create a separate Ad Group for each keyword you are targeting. This is a best practice to allow you to truly measure the effectiveness of keywords. many experienced advertisers simply group all keywords in one Ad Group (example Campaign #1, Campaign #2) without understanding the impact this has on their overall Google Quality Score. While making each targeted keyword a single Ad Group may be better for measuring results and improving the quality score, this will also result in more ad groups to manage. Managing thousands of Ad Groups can become a daunting task so you will need to find the right balance to assure that all factors are considered when creating and setting up your PPC campaign.

Other important factors to consider when setting up your campaign is to not just chose the defaults. You always want to setup your campaign for network only first and get this working efficiently. Once this is setup and working fine, you can then sprinkle in turning on other features such as Content Network, which allows you to post your ads on other peoples sites. You can turn on Rotate Ads, which allows you to split test your ads to see which one is performing better and you can also turn throttle the delivery method that allows your ads to show up without Google controlling when they show and when they do not. One of the most important feature to configure is the campaign budget and setting a budget that is in line with market demand while matching your ability to deliver. You should always setup a list of negative keywords, which are keywords you tell Google or the other search engines to not trigger your ads if these negative words are within the search activity. Launching a PPC campaign without the use if negative keywords is one of the biggest mistakes armatures make when setting up PPC campaigns. An example of a negative keyword is -Rental. If for example you are an RV Dealer and only only sell new or preowned RV's, you do not want your ads being triggered for all the people out there searching for RV rentals. If you include the -Rental, this will assure that your ad does not trigger and will only trigger when people search for keywords like BUY NEW RV or BUY PREOWNED RV.

We have already provided examples on how to write effective PPC ads in another section of the site. More importantly, we cannot stress the importance of using a tool like AdWords Editor. This tool allows you to download your entire account or specific AdGroups and make blanket changes within seconds. Using this tool can save you countless hours of having to make these changes one by one within your online account with Google. Another best practice is to use what is called Dynamic Keyword Insertion within your ads. This allows you to insert a variable within your ads and replace with the actual keyword. Again, this tool has many features that will allow you to work with thousands of ads and make changes to all within seconds vs. hours.

Once your ads are running, you should spend adequate time performing split testing, monitoring statistics, tweaking bids and determining how and where to make continuous improvements. We recommend you install Google Analytics on your site as this shows you exactly where all your traffic is coming from, the keywords used and lots more very useful information.

Knowing how to setup an effective PPC campaign is essential to a successful campaign. If done correctly, you will see more new customers than you ever thought possible. Call us today at 281-547-0939 or click on the Contact Us page to schedule a free consultation.

  • Google AdWords
  • Yahoo Search Marketing
  • msn adCenter
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