Pay per click marketing is literally guaranteed to get traffic to your website – even if it is brand new. The only drawbacks can be how much you want to pay for that traffic and your subsequent ability to get conversions.

Many times what separates successful PPC campaigns from a failures are a few tweaks at the front end (your campaign setup and ads) and the back end (your landing page or conversion strategy). These small things like well written ad copy, crisp banner images and a compelling landing page and call to action can be the things that determine failure from success.

Target Your CustomersOne other thing that can also improve your success is having the right pay per click campaign structure that effectively targets your customers correctly. This applies to any PPC search engine you might choose to use (and there are quite a few other than the usual suspects of Google Adwords and the Microsoft Bing / Yahoo Search Marketing Alliance however in sticking with the popular option, lets look at a few things you can do to improve your Google Adwords campaigns.

Setting up a correct structure for your Google Adwords campaigns in the first instance makes it easier to manage your ads and creates greater relevancy across your ad groups which, in the broad scheme of things can help you get a better Quality Score from Google (and hopefully lower ad costs).

If you already have a Google Adwords account then you may want to follow these few simple tips to help you start heading in the right direction from your next campaign.

Create Campaigns By Topic And Ensure Your Setting Are Correct

Basic Adwords accounts are able to create 25 campaigns by default (however the master accounts for high-end users can sometimes be allowed to create 50 or 100 campaigns per account however even the initial 25 campaigns still gives you a lot of flexibility and you can create multiple adgroups under each campaign so this should be enough for most people to get started.

You don’t want to be lazy a this stage and although it may seem like a lot of work – it will pay off when it comes to monitoring and assessing your campaign performance so assigning names related to the campaign topic is generally a good practice. It doesn’t have to be anything clever but you want to know from first glance exactly what your campaign is targeting with the underlaying adgroups and keywords.

Each campaign can be setup to target your market as tightly as possible. For example, if you are running local PPC campaigns for a particular geographical location then use this and then when you set your daily budget and location targeting options they all apply to the ads you have written.

Getting these settings right requires you to have done some decent market research, obviously you would be wasting prescious advertising dollars by running a campaign for the whole country if your ads state a specific local offer or you are only able to deliver these products or services in your local City or State.

Also, when configuring your settings, unless you really know what you are doing you may want to limit your campaigns to just the Google Search Network and stay away from the content network for now. While the Google Content Network can provide you with a ton of impressions and low cost clicks, many of these are completely un-targeted and may end up blowing your budget without ever making a decent conversion.

Cluster Your Adgroups By Theme

Each Adwords campaign is able to contain as many as 100 adgroups. While this is still a lot of information to manage it is a lot easier if you have completed comprehensive keyword research before you start and classifying your adgroups correctly is another step you don’t want to bypass, no matter how minor it may seem.

Creating themes for your ads provides a great way to sort them into groups. Try to think of your campaigns as the main topic, the adgroups as subtopics and the individual ads as micro-topics. Drawing yourself up a simple tree diagram with a hierarchy of these three elements can also help in the planning stage before you start creating the adgroups.

As an example, if you were selling retail video games you would most likely be running a number of specific ads for the different hardware products and games available. In this case you would probably want to create a campaign for each gaming platform (Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii) and then think of groups in which the products for each platform can be classified.

Therefore, you would end up with something like “Xbox 360 Consoles”, “Xbox 360 Accessories”, “Xbox 360 Action Games” and “Xbox 360 Sports Games and other similar adgroups. Then, under an adgroup like “Xbox 360 Action Games” you would write ads for the individual games like “Call of Duty Black Ops” or “Medal of Honor” and then proceed to the keyword bidding phase from there.

Your adgroups are the place to keep related products and services together and this makes it far easier to browse through your campaigns and also to keep a level of relevance that is important to Google.

Bid For Keywords Relevant To Your Ads

Once you have successfully setup your adgroups then it is time to start creating the copy for your ads – again, at this point it is important to ensure that they are relevant.

Your ad text, keywords and quality scores will help to determine your Cost Per Click (CPC) and they should be as closely related as possible and there are a number of tools available on the market to assist you with determining your optimum CPC and to have an idea of what keywords and prices your competitors are bidding and you only need to outbid your competitors by the smallest amount in an attempt to get a better placement so there is no need to go crazy and bid excessively high prices at this point because Google will be happy to take your money.

So that basically wraps up a few key points that I wanted to make about setting up PPC campaigns, particularly for Google Adwords and just remember the important point here it to keep things relevant and logical and it is hard to go wrong when you keep that in mind.

Keep an eye out soon for some more posts showing you how you can maximise your PPC performance or speak to your PPC Company about how they can best help you.

If you would like to discuss how Sunshine Coast SEO can help you setup and manage your PPC marketing campaigns to target international opportunities or just a simple campaign for Sunshine Coast PPC Marketing then please Click Here to Contact Us by email or give us a call directly on 0424 808 337.


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