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10 essential myths for Successful Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaign

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising sounds easy to go with and usually business advertisers intend to use PPC to drive targeted but immediate traffic to their business sites. Unlike a small percentage, most of them don’t really know how to effectively run a PPC campaign to gain maximum results while spending minimum possible cost in internet marketing. This ends up with dramatically un-expected or sometimes no results accompanied with an argument that “PPC (Pay Per Click) is useless and just a wastage of money and time”. Another class of business operators outsource their internet marketing and PPC campaigns to highly experienced, trusted but well paid Pay Per Click management companies letting them spend the PPC budgets at their own will and learn new methodologies and strategies on customer’s money. Besides the bright and dark circumstances in PPC or internet marketing, specially a business owner should know what is going to do the best for their business in PPC (Pay Per Click) and internet marketing.

Benefits of PPC (Pay Per Click)

If managed well after doing all the research and considering preliminary precautions, PPC (Pay Per Click) works the best and is the most cost efficient yet quickest way to promote or advertise any business over the internet and search engines. In addition, you have then full access to track and generate immediate results with an un-beaten PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign.

Now, let’s try revealing the secrets of a successful PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing campaign.

Identify your market

When it comes to internet or search engine marketing, one can practically experience the tour of whole global village just within couple of hours or days. But must know that with each visit, handsome amount of money is associated and if advertised in non-operative market place, can result into wastage of helluve of money. If you’re researching your market place yourself, make sure you hit the wall right and narrow your geographical market place right within boundaries of your business operations. In case of an outsourced PPC marketing campaign, explicitly ask that they really understand your targeted market and have done all their homework to pitch your products or services within the right place.

Hit the Right Audience

A business may not be interested in generating specially paid traffic from a particular group of community. For example, a mobile phone seller should not pay for clicks made by people searching for ringtones, wall papers, mobile applications or bulk SMS packages. Surveys prove that most of the internet advertisers don’t take this part seriously and most of the times they create opportunities for non-potential customers to kill their PPC marketing budget. For a successful Pay Per Click marketing campaign, don’t just rely on demographics, rather research to work with the real people, try using descriptive avatars that self explain the overall theme of your products or services. This will give you an added benefit of understanding the response and reaction of your customers. Plus, you also create an opportunity for yourself to better understand how your customers want to see your products and how not. In a nutshell, if your Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing ads give a feeling of understanding the needs and your products or services are worthwhile, they gona buy them for sure.

Make your customers take an Action

Clearly define what you want your site visitors to do. More focused you’re about what you need your site visitors should do; more the chances for them to act just as you want. But if you’re not that clear and fill up your page with tons of information and many directions to move, will make things hard for customers to decide and most probably, they’ll just click away with a promise to never come back again.
Address yourself and try to understand what action you want from your site visitor and design your pages right according to the sales needs. Desired actions can vary from case to case like; you may be interested that you site visitors:

• Click the “Buy” button and directly make a purchase.
• Download an informative document.
• Sing up with your site and become a member.
• Request a custom quote.
• Or call to book an appointment.
• Opt-in to your newsletter

Required actions will of course vary from case to case. So be focused on design for your landing pages that they offer the crystal clear information and inviting the direction to take an action.

Understand What They Need

This is very critical point that plays vital role in success or failure of a PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing campaign. Surprisingly, in my personal experience of meetings and conferences with many internet & search engine marketers around the globe, I discovered the fact that only a small ratio of Pay Per Click (PPC) experts know or take this factor into account while managing PPC marketing campaigns for their clients. You must understand how your potential customers want to look at your site and what actually they’re looking for. Even combination of your highly targeted keyword with some generic phrases may mean far different intent for an internet searcher.  Let’s say someone types “Rolex Watches” or “Rolex Watch” on Google and hits the search button. Mostly likely this searcher has intentions to research and know some features about Rolex watches instead of purchasing. However, an actual buyer with intentions to buy the Rolex watch will actually type the actual modal or category like “Bezel Rolex Datejusts watches”. Technically this is called dealing with “Negative Keywords”. Each industry and business corresponds to diverse amount of negative keywords which must be researched well and applied to spend budgets in the very right direction in any internet or Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing campaign.

Start with small but expand to bigger

Especially a new business owner or even an expert PPC (Pay Per Click) marketer may not have full grip over a particular industry. To avoid wasting notable part of advertisement cost in useless and irrelevant keywords and communities. Better start with small group of keywords geared right towards your services or products and expand as you learn more the industry, behavior of searchers and search engines. Can be a useful tip for new businesses or the one with small advertising budgets.

Split Testing Ads

It is again an astonishing statical fact that most of the internet & search engine marketers don’t practice split testing their ads in PPC (Pay Per Click) internet marketing campaign. This can be a helpful resource for better understanding the response to your ads and improve the performance even better.

Create two or more ads in your adwords account. Better to test both at a time so if you come up with some rocking ideas and create multiple ads at a time, the easiest way would be to pause the other ads and run the two just created. Once you have received 50-100 clicks (the more, the better for accurate results but see your budget first) you can select the winner. The problem is that, making a change in an active ad will demolish the statistics history and you will lose the opportunity to compare with old data. What you should do is, pause the old ads and create two new ads while one of these two should be exact clone of the most performing ad.  Now start the two fresh ads while historic statistics are preserved from old ads for analysis and auditing. Another but bit more time consuming option could be to download the statistics in a spreadsheet and make changes in active ads instead of duplicating anything.

Using the Landing Pages

The purpose of a PPC (Pay Per Click) advertizing campaign should be to invite searchers to a page where they find exact information what they’ve searched for and the information should be clear and easy to find for site visitor. This can be accomplished by using landing pages and I always recommend landing pages specially when you’re expecting only one or maximum two results from a page. However, business owners with limited web design experience or the ones running online business without a webmaster should drive their visitors through Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing campaigns to the pages with most relevant information and a clear way to perform desired action.

Analytics

After all, there must be way using which you gather and store all the statistics of your website and analyze the searchers and visitors behaviors in your Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing campaign. Even if you don’t know how to do it and where to go for this. Hire external resources or an expert who can configure analytics for you. Alternatively, just Google for statistics or analytical services, you will find bunch of useful resources categorized into paid and free services. You can even consult Google and easily configure Google analytics in your site.

Adhering the Stats

Once have configured your site with trusted and powerful analytics software, try analyzing your stats at least twice a day and compare the sales with your PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing expenses and monitor your keywords if they’re driving the right traffic for your website.  Immediate actions may be required on daily basis as far keyword optimization based on the results you notice in statical data. But this process should be prolonged as long as you’re comfortable that your keywords are highly optimized and generating at least expected profits.

Educate yourself with PPC (Pay Per Click)

Constantly and consistently analyze your stats and try to learn more from your success and failures.  The same time, keep a critic eye on your competitors and try getting good things from them too. List down all your success and failure stories in a spreadsheet and before doing any change in your PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing campaign, consult with it.


Since I manage many accounts, industries and customers simultaneously, so I headed up with a personal notebook few years ago where I write down all my success and failures to keep my PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing experience pure and flawless. You too will learn from the experience and I strongly recommend documenting your dooms and glooms.


I just tried to summarize my personal findings during my professional PPC (Pay Per Click) or search engine marketing experience. Of course, new challenges come around every morning but always there’s a way to deal with them. If you’re managing your search engine marketing campaign yourself or have outsourced to external resources,  you should adhered well the above 10 myths to be sure that your PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing campaigns are doing the best for you.

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