Zen and the Art of PPC – A Five Step approach

By Simon Dang
Business Online
simon@businessol.com

Over the past few years I’ve modified my approach to Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing in response to the popularity of PPC and all of the great technological advances in Overture and Google AdWords. Despite these changes, there still remain some basic core principals that I always focus on for a successful PPC campaign. By following these five simple steps, you can achieve a well balanced PPC campaign that will hum along for you in no time. The key is to balance all five principles equally, hence the Zen of PPC.

Measurements of Success – What are you aiming for?
At our company, a measurement of success is one of the most important questions we ask our clients. So before you begin a PPC campaign ask yourself (or your client) what are the goals for this campaign? How do you want to measure your success? In 99.99% of the time, this boils down to conversions. A conversion can be in the form of sales, a phone call, registrations, downloads, etc. Unless you are doing a pure branding campaign, conversions really should be your end goal. Note that a conversion is much different than a click.

PPC Life Cycle
Let’s take a quick look at how this works and analyze what is going on in PPC Advertising.
1) Your potential web visitor/client goes to Google, Yahoo, Msn or an affiliate site and types in a keyword phrase, for example “web marketing”.
2) Your ad appears alongside the results.
3) They read your ad and click.
4) They visit your site.
5) They find what they want and pick up the phone, fax, order something online, email you, etc = Conversion!


So if conversions are your end goal, how do you increase the number of conversions in PPC? The five principles for a successful PPC campaign are the same as those described in the PPC lifecycle above. It can be very simple and easy. The trick is to balance all five principles.

Step 1: Keywords
Picking the right keywords is critical to any search engine marketing project whether this is an organic SEO project or PPC. You need to pick out the words that directly apply to your product or service. How do you find these words? To start, use the Google keyword tool and the Overture tool. These tools will tell you what words are popular and what words people are bidding on. There are plenty of keyword resources available on the internet. Among my favorites is wordtracker.com as it will do a lateral search for you and then rank the words by popularity. Try various combinations of adjectives and verb stems i.e. Skateboard supplies, Skateboarding parts, etc. If you are in a specific locale, use your city name or location such as Southern California surf boards or La Jolla oceanfront real estate, etc.

Marketability / Buying Cycle Words
If you are a B2C type of company, you may want to think about categorizing your keywords into different parts of the buying cycle. For example there are purely research oriented words such as “mp3 player review” vs. specific buying words for those ready to purchase such as “ipod mini”. On the most part, research words are less expensive in PPC than buying words, but research words may not convert as quickly to a sale. Depending on your marketing budget you will need to find the optimal ratio to get you the sales as well as the traffic.