How to Build a Successful PPC Campaign

Pay Per Click or PPC is the widely used (or should I say most used) campaigns to promote a product or service over the internet. It is also being used to promote affiliate products and very popular among affiliate marketers. It’s kind of a lifeline to internet businesses. It works on a bidding system where advertisers bid on the keywords and publishers get paid when a visitor clicks on the ads on their website.

Building a successful PPC campaign is not an easy job to do. It requires lots of research and testing. Trial and error is the best way to learn managing a successful PPC campaign, but let me assist to get started with it. There are few things to keep in mind while starting a PPC Campaign:

1. Setting up a Budget
2. Choosing proper Keywords and Bidding on them
3. Call for Action or Creating an Ad
4. Geo Target the campaign
5. Tracking Conversion

1. Setting up a Budget
Budget is the amount of money you intend to spend on the PPC campaign. You should limit your daily budget as well as the overall budget to an amount you can afford. You can raise the limit if your ads are converting well.

2. Choosing Keywords and Bidding on them
Choosing keywords is the key to the success of a PPC campaign. Bidding on general and common keywords is just waste of money. You should rather bid on long tail keywords which send highly targeted traffic. Google Adwords has a very good yet free keyword research tool.

Almost all PPC networks, like Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Microsoft AdCenter have a smart bidding option. It lets you bid on keywords automatically; you just have to enter a maximum price you want to pay for a click. You can always manually bid on keywords, but smart bidding works best.

3. Call for Action or Creating an Ad
It’s the main part of building a PPC campaign. You should use your creativity to make an ad which interests the visitor. People notice the Title of the advertisement first, so make it attractive. Use the description field to describe your business in short.

You can also create image ads and video ads for your campaign if the PPC network supports it. A picture is worth a thousand words; use it wisely to describe your business.

4. Geo Targeting your campaign
You can choose which part of the world you ads will appear. Set this up if you have a local business and need to target visitors from a continent or a country. Google Adwords can narrow it down to target a city only.

5. Tracking Conversions
Conversions in PPC campaigns are the goals achieved from the ads. A conversion is done when someone clicks on your ads and complete a purchase (or anything you want the visitor to do) on your site.
Tracking conversions are necessary as it shows the return on investment for you. It also shows if your campaigns need any modification or optimization. You should change the keywords or try new keywords when you see a low conversion rate on your campaign. You can also raise your budget limit to get your ads show more frequently when the conversion rate is good.

Actually, setting up a successful PPC campaign is lot more than what I told and it’s beyond the scope of this post.