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DIY PPC

The name of the game when managing a Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaign is ROI, or Return On Investment. If you can work out a system for accurately tracking sales, newsletter sign-ups, or whatever your "goal" is for your visitors (known collectively as "conversions") compared to the number of clicks you're paying for, you've won half the battle toward effectively managing your own PPC campaign. The other primary components of effective Pay Per Click management are choosing the right keywords and phrases to "bid" on, and writing the ad copy for the actual PPC ads themselves.

Most Pay Per Click advertising systems have built-in tools for researching key words. It is in their best interests to keep their advertisers happy, which means they will try to give you the tools you need to select the best words for your campaign. What you want to find are relevant phrases and words that have a good balance between number of searches and affordable bids. Often a longer, more specific phrase will bring a better conversion rate at a lower price, because the customers searching for that phrase already have a very good idea what they want, while the more generic phrases and single word searches can attract a larger percentage of people who are still window shopping and doing research.

Writing optimal ad copy for a PPC ad is the subject of never-ending discussion and debate, even among professional Pay Per Click management specialists. Depending on what goal you are trying to achieve, your best advertising copy could range from a simple "Buy [Keyword] Here!" to a more information-oriented "Latest [Keyword] News in our newsletter" or something else entirely. If you want to really properly manage your own PPC campaign, you will probably want to comparison test different key phrases, and analyse how many clicks each one garners compared to the conversion rate for each different ad ... which brings us to the biggest part of good Pay Per Click management: conversion tracking.

To really determine the effectiveness of your PPC campaign, you need to be able to track how many of your visitors come from the PPC ad, along with how many of that subset of visitors actually follow through with your desired action once they're at your site. There are various ways of doing this, including: a) directing clicks from each ad to a different landing page on your site, then tracking conversions from each landing page (probably the best 'low-tech' solution), or b) using a special 'tag' at the end of the URL used in each ad, ie. www.mysite.com/page.htm?ad1, ../?ad2, etc., then using your site statistics software to track each referrer (easier than option a. if you're familiar with tracking visitors that way).

Whichever conversion tracking method you choose, you can then see what ad copy and keyword bids attract the most visitors, as well as which ads bring the most conversions! However, diligently tracking all this information can be daunting, especially if you are making a large number of keyword bids on more than one PPC ad network. Many people choose to either hire an outside firm to manage their PPC advertising, or (given the financial resources) hire a dedicated employee to handle tracking their campaigns.