PPC known as pay per click, is the act of buying ads that you pay per click made to them. The goal of a PPC Campaign? Provide quality traffic, build up potential leads, and in the end, gain customers. A good campaign doesn’t just build traffic, but the right traffic that is more likely to bring in quality leads.
Running campaigns need to be SMART. As I learned during studying for my Facebook certification define your campaigns by the following principles.
Specific – defining goals that matter to the business
Measurable – choosing goals that make informed decisions
Attainable – setting realistic goals. Slight changes that produce results
Relevant – Goals that reflect the purpose and mission
Time-bound – set deadlines so that they end at a specific time and can be evaluated
Why Pay For Ads Vs Targeting Organic Traffic?
As someone who has build sites that drove over 30,000 organic leads per day from search engines, organic traffic does get you free, often relevant traffic. But, the space is getting more and more competitive. You also can’t always choose which pages will be ranked higher. As well, the process of getting a page ranked takes time and effort, which will more often set you behind in your marketing efforts.
I’m not suggesting to neglect SEO, just that it can’t be your only strategy. PPC is a major way to test the profitability of ideas, and drive traffic immediately, just at a cost.
Steps To Set Up a Successful PPC Marketing Campaign
Step 1: Research your customer. You need to fully understand your customer and what exactly they are looking for. One thing I generally setup is called “buyer personas”.
Step 2: Understanding the customer. Using your buyer persona, generate a list of keywords that potential customers would use to find your product. These are the terms that would be typed in to your targeted channel (Facebook, Google, etc) and your ad would show up under. All keyword ideas are valid, even if they seem crazy, as long as they apply to the personality of your customer!
Step 3: Keyword validation. Using Google Keyword Planner will give you insights into the cost, traffic, and even some competitive data. For a basic idea how the tool works, I used the keyword custom t-shirts in the planner.
Here we see variations of the keyword I chose, the average search volume, total competition, as well as the range of bids to compete.
There are 4 match types you can use when setting your keywords including:
- Broad Match
- Modified Broad Match
- Phrase Match
- Exact Match
Step 4: Determine Possible Cost Per Conversion.
Max CPC = (profit per customer) * (1 – profit margin) * (website conversion rate)
Using this formula on the above list of keywords we can calculate some hypothetical conversion costs.
In this hypothetical T-Shirt your profit per customer is $4, and out of 100 visits, 5 people make a purchase. This would mean a conversion rate of 5% (5/100). With an estimated profit margin of 20%, your calculation would look like this: Profit Margin = (Shirt Revenue / Shirt Sales Price) x 100 so our profit margin would be 40%.
Max CPC = 4 x (1-.4) x .05 = .12
That means the most we could spend per click would be just 12 cents!
Let’s adjust that formula a bit and see what we could send if our shirt was $20 rather than $10. We would get a new formula: 14 x (1-.7) x .05 = .21. That would mean we could profitably spend 21 cents per click.
Conclusion, according to our current metrics, we could not profitably use any of the keywords from the able above!
Step 6: Determine Profitable Keywords. Using the formula continue to research keywords to determine what your max spend is. Once running your keywords you will quickly discover winners and loser.
What defines a winner in PPC? It converts well enough to be profitable. Put simply, your conversion makes a profit after all of your total expenses.