« Google Hired 15-Year Old Teenager (Fired in a day)

PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Advertising - Day 1

Welcome to day 1 of this week’s study. We’re going to be looking at PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising over the next few days, and how you can successfully run a good PPC campaign. So lets get straight to it.

Choosing Keywords

This is the hardest thing you’ll have to do in your PPC campaigns, by far. Getting the right keywords is probably the most important part of your PPC Campaigns. So what can we do to make sure ours are as good as possible? Well first of all, lets go back to out old SEO study. Our keyword phrase there was Small Business Solutions. If you remember, we used Good Keywords to help us find highly searched for terms, and to help us get ahead. Another function of Good Keywords, is that it offers alternate suggestions for other searched for terms. So what can we do with this?

We can start to build a list of terms for our PPC campaign!

Counting the Cost

Now, we need to look at how much we should be bidding on these terms. This is where most people fall short. Pretty much anyone with a little common sense can come up with good keyword phrases, but to find out the bid prices is a little harder. Fortunately, I know how to do this, and I’m going to walk you through it step by step. (For this example, I’m going to be using Google AdWords, but if you use something else, don’t worry. The PPC engines are all fairly similar, and you should be able to figure it out from what I’m going to say.)

Firstly, open your AdWords account. Go through the various parts. Then when you get to pricing, click the small bit that says about estimating traffic and costs. This will give you a rough guide as to how much you need to pay, and how much traffic you’re going to get.

Simple as that. But strangely, most people miss it. Make sure you’re not one of them! That’s all for today. Check back tomorrow when we’ll be finding out how to optimize our click through rates.