Seven questions to answer before launching your PPC campaign

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Introducing Google AdWords - your one stop shop to global brand visibility on a budget.

Pay per click (PPC) advertising is an internet advertising method that drives traffic to your website. It has revolutionised the world of buying and selling and eliminated the need for the dreaded cold calling and door-to-door advertising techniques. Instead, your clients or customers actually come to you.

While it is not free, although Google does offer grants for non-profits, PPC is a lot more affordable when compared to traditional advertising methods, such as print and exhibitions, and provides much greater visibility and flexibility.

To succeed with PPC advertising you need a few tips and tricks to ensure you beat the competition and see a healthy return-on-investment (ROI). It would also be helpful if you could read minds (if only you knew exactly what customers will be typing into those search engines).

However, if you happen to be one of us mere mortals, ask yourself these seven questions before you start with PPC advertising:

1. Are your marketing goals and audience defined?

As with any marketing campaign you need to know what it is you are trying to achieve before you can start with PPC. Google offers various options for advertisers to personalise their campaigns and make sure that they are targeting the right buyers.

Before getting started, you will need to know what people will be typing into a search engine when searching for your product or service. Google's keyword planner is an excellent tool to use for this purpose and enables you to perform keyword research, find search estimates and see how much you are likely to pay for a click (bid estimates).

Should your bid estimates look too high, take a deep breath and relax. Keep in mind that keyword bids are determined by the competitiveness of an industry - as with any bidding war; the more bidders, the higher the price will go.

However, Google does not want the rich to dominate the world wide web (www). Therefore, there are many other ways for you to bring down your cost per click. Yap, Google rewards hard work and brainpower!

2. Do you have a website or a landing page?

This is the most important requirement for a successful PPC campaign. If you don't have somewhere to send visitors that click on your ad, you won't be able to sell to them.

A website is the perfect tool to show off your product or service and convince buyers that you have what they want. Keep in mind that the page you send visitors to when they click on your ad (landing page) has a direct influence on your keyword quality score. If your web page is not relevant to your ad, a search engine will not deliver you as a result to users.

Another very important aspect is a well-structured website. As with everything in life, PPC is all about structure. If your campaigns are a mess, your return on investment (ROI) will be too.

Carefully study and observe the structure of your website and setup your PPC campaigns accordingly. For example, should you have a site that sells genuine leather and pleather sandals as well as summer dresses in South Africa and Australia, you will have three separate campaigns for leather sandals, pleather sandals and summer dresses.

You might, in fact, even choose to have six campaigns by duplicating each product campaign and focusing one on South Africa and the other on Australia. The reason why you would do this, is to ensure that each campaign is personalised for its specific audience, thereby enabling better results as well as a more accurate measurement of results.

3. Is your website/landing page SEO friendly?

SEO is the key ingredient to any digital campaign - it's all about keywords, meta tags, captions, headings, negative keywords etc. Does it sound complicated? It might make your head spin, but basically what SEO is all about is this; when visitors land on your site, they need to immediately understand your service offering and easily navigate your site to go where they want to go.

The same goes for search engine crawlers (e.g. Googlebot) that want to explore your site and match its content with user's searches. These crawlers need to ensure that relevant content is displayed and users are happy with search results.

Research SEO best practice and make sure you have an SEO-friendly website or landing page as these directly influence your ad quality score - the higher this score, the easier it is to beat the competition and bring down your cost per click.

4. Have you done your research?

Is your target audience actually searching for your product on the WWW? It would be hard to believe if they are not, but you need to make sure that PPC is worth your time. Use Google's keyword planner to find search volumes for the keywords related to your products.

In addition, go and spy on your competitors. Look at their websites, SEO structures, keywords and ads. As the marketing guru Alex Mandossian once said: "Being original is one of the biggest threats to marketers".

No this does not mean you should plagiarise or steal others ideas, it simply means you cannot implement a marketing campaign with no interest in what other industry stakeholders and competitors are doing. Being aware is how you can ensure you are staying on top.

Lastly, budget research is extremely important. The whole reason why you are reading about PPC is because you want to make money and see an ROI. Therefore, you need to ensure that the budget you have available will be able to provide you with an ROI.

Google allows you to spend very little, if very little is all you have. You are also able to schedule your campaigns to only display your ads at certain times. For example, if you have a business that uses freelance teachers to help children with homework and you have a limited budget it would be wise to only schedule your campaigns in the afternoons when parents will realise their children need help and search for assistance online.

5. Are you aware of what your competitors are doing?

You will realise that spying on competitors is a big part of digital advertising. Simply because you have to know what your competitors are doing to attract your clients in order for you to attract your clients

Look at the text in your competitor's PPC ads and see how their ads compare to yours. Ultimately, this, coupled with your ad position, is what will determine whether a user will click on your ad or not. A well written ad can be in fifth position on a page and beat an ad in first position simply because it caught a user's attention.

Don't just blindly write ads, compare them with competitor ads and run split tests to see how they perform.

6. Are you ready for multimedia?

If search is the only thing that pops into your head when you hear the word PPC think again. Multimedia plays a big role in PPC. Ever watched a YouTube video and eagerly waited for the seconds to tick off before you are allowed to skip an ad and go to the video?

PPC allows you to advertise on different channels; YouTube being one of them. This opens up to a whole new world of advertising opportunities as you are now able to entice your audience with visual manipulation.

Better yet, you can actually stalk people with PPC! Ever searched a property website and then all of a sudden found property ads popping up on Facebook and on your Gmail account? Well now the shoe is on the other foot and you can be the hunter instead of the prey.

Be sure to take hold of all the different channels of advertising (display, search and video) when you setup a PPC campaign. Some enticing images and videos can go a long way towards ensuring that you are users' first choice when it comes to buying.

7. Are you willing to strategise to ensure an affordable PPC campaign?

The only sure thing that can be said about PPC is that there is no sure thing about PPC. Search engines, such as Google, need to keep changing their algorithms to ensure that no one can dominate search results without working at it and being relevant.

If PPC was purely focused on the highest bid, large corporates would own the WWW and small companies would be left on Page 47 of Google where no one has the time or energy to go.

PPC is giving all companies a fair chance to get the leads they need and, ultimately, convert them. Therefore, you need to be prepared to strategise, study, analyse, compare and adjust to stay on top in the world of PPC.

The only sure thing about PPC advertising is that a well prepared and managed PPC campaign will deliver the results you need for your business to prosper.