To get a pay-per-click campaign off the ground is not as easy as it might sound. Some of my clients have tried their hand at running their own campaigns, only to be overwhelmed by the time it takes to manage their campaigns, as well as the frustration of not really knowing how to make their campaigns work.

They eventually landed up knocking on our door, needing us to take up their campaigns & make it work for them.

So, if you are interested in running your own PPC campaigns, then you need to do some preliminary work, to make sure that you know what you are dealing with. In this article, I’ll introduce the basics of a PPC campaign to you, of which you’ll need a good understanding to get started. For the sake of consistency, I’ll refer to Google Adwords which is Google’s PPC product.

How does a Google Adwords campaign work?

Assuming that you have successfully created your Google Adwords account, ads & keyword lists, the process is as follows:

• The user, who is someone out there searching for something related to your ads on Google, will type one of your keywords into the search bar

• Google will then spit out search results which a relevant to the search query. As I discussed in my previous article, Pay Per Click Advertising – An Introduction,  the “organic listings” are the search results that are found on the left hand side of the page. These results appear there naturally & we cannot pay Google to put them there.

• The “paid listings” are the ones that appear on the top left & right hand side of the page. Google refers to these results as the ‘sponsored links’. These are the results that we are interested in. One of these results will be an ad that you created using Google Adwords. They are referred to as ‘sponsored links’ because advertisers pay to have them appear there each time a relevant keyword is searched by a user.

• Okay, so now that someone has searched one of your keywords, your ad is now staring them right in the face. Your ad seems like it could provide the answers to their questions, so they click on it.

• Once your ad is clicked, the user is then directed to a page on your website. When you created your ad, you would have inserted the URL for one of your web pages into the ad known as the “Destination URL”. The user will be redirected to this very page.

• Once the user arrives on this web page, they will start looking around your website to see if they can find what they are looking for.

• The user will then “convert” from a website visitor into an actual customer/client, depending on whether they have found what they are looking for on your landing page or not.

Every time one of your ads is clicked, Google will charge you a fee, hence the term ‘cost-per-click’ (cpc). You will have a good idea of what Google charges per click, because you would have set a maximum cpc bid for each your keywords. This means that you would have determined what the maximum amount is that you are willing to pay per click, for each keyword.

Some advertisers prefer to pay a fee per ‘impression’. An impression is every single time your ad is displayed, but not necessarily clicked. So, your maximum cost-per-impression is the highest amount that you are willing to pay per 1000 impressions.

Relevancy

Relevancy is a very important concept to master if you are advertising in this way.

Relevancy refers to how useful your ad’s information is to the user. The more relevant the content of your ad is, compared to the keyword searched & the content of your landing page, the more useful it will be to the user. When Google sees that your ads are relevant in this way, they often reward you for this by pushing your ad up in position without increasing your cpc. So, the more relevant your ads are, the more likely your ads will beat your competitor ads in position & in cost. Effectively this means that the advertisers whose ads are beneath yours, could be paying more than you are per click.

If you are willing to play smart, you will actually save money on your ads, as well as take the lions share of the potential business out there. If you are committed to running your campaign in the way it should be run, then you will find that the money invested in your ads is returned many times over by the amount of business brought in by the ads.

In the next installment, we’ll go through a basic list of things that you need to have in place before you start your pay per click campaign.

• Related posts:

  • Pay Per Click Advertising – Glossary of Terms
  • Pay Per Click Advertising – An Introduction
  • PPC Advertising – What You’ll Need To Start Your Campaign
  • How much are big brands spending on Google Adwords?