As the owner of an Internet based business, knowing how to drive traffic to your website is one of your most important responsibilities. If you do not have any traffic you will not get any sales. With this in mind, whatever kind of business you are in, traffic has to be your priority. This article will focus on Google AdWords pay per click advertising, known as PPC, which is an ideal way of targeting traffic to your website. Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC) can be a very effective marketing tool when used skillfully and wisely. However, in order to avoid the many pitfalls, which may be just around the corner, you need to have some knowledge about what you are doing.
1. Your Ad Campaign Should Be Properly Structured.
When creating a new ad campaign it’s best to consider a number of smaller ad groups within, instead of making the mistakes of many by creating a single ad group and filling it with keywords by the thousands. It’s much better to come up with a few different categories as a way of describing your business and concentrate on developing clusters of closely related keywords within each group.
2. Set your “Networks and devices”
The Google Display Network used to be known as the “content” network. When display network is turned on, your ads will display anywhere that the keywords that you are bidding on are displayed. If you’re just getting started, leave “Search” on and turn off “Display Network”. This way your ads will only show up in the search results when someone keys those terms into the search box. (Chances are that this is your best chance to reach buyers.) You don’t want your ad showing up in random blog posts about your product. You want it to show up when someone is ready to buy.
3. Use Negative Keywords
Enter negative keywords to prevent people who are searching for your product (using keywords that you want to avoid) from ever seeing your PPC ad. For example, if you’re selling fine art, you may want to exclude people who are searching on terms like ‘clip”, “print” and “poster” from seeing (and clicking on) your ad. Using the right negative keywords can be as important to your campaign as choosing the right ones.
4. Landing Pages & Micro-Sites
When someone clicks on your pay-per-click ad, you don’t have to send them to your home page. Actually, you probably shouldn’t. If the web content of the page that you send them to does not match your ad, they’re out-of-there and you’ve spent money on a click with no monetary return. Send visitors to the page that contains the information on your ads.
5. Learn How to Write An Ad
Specifically, one which will draw the attention of the reader and entice them to click on it. As the number of characters allowed for the ad copy is limited, you can learn how to do this from the classified ads in magazines and newspapers. Take a look through the ads and make a note of any that really caught your attention, and then on closer inspection, ask yourself what attracted you to it. If you can write ads which get more clicks, you will increase your CTR (click through ratio) and this is likely to result in a lower minimum bid that you have to pay for each click.
6. Testing and Tracking Your Ads
You can do this by creating multiple ads and then rotating them to see which ones get the best results as far as CTR is concerned. In order for your tests to be valid, run them so that each ad gets in the region of 50 clicks. When first setting up your campaign, make sure you take the option of evenly rotating your ads. If you do not do this the default option will let the system automatically optimize showing your best ad more regularly. If this happens you will not be able to run your tests accurately.
The learning curve at becoming proficient at Google AdWords is steep. However, if you stick at it and eventually master the system, you will be rewarded well by the targeted traffic to your website.
