Ah PPC the life blood of search engines huge profits and what a lot of business owners have tried and now hate!
Most businesses in the digital age have or have tried Pay Per Click advertising and a lot of those businesses where left with a bad taste in their mouth. (The taste of wasted marketing budgets)
Which leads to the question. Is PPC advertising worth it for your business? Well the question is simply met with more questions.
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Is it profitable.
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If not could it be if managed better?
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Are my other marketing and traffic sources more profitable?
PPC advertising is not as simple as bid on a keyword and watch the traffic roll in. There are many factors that make or break a PPC campaign and when executed properly can lead to an amazingly profitable campaign.
The most common reasons we see PPC campaigns failing are poor campaign structure, poor quality scores, poor ad copy and poor landing page optimisation.
Campaign Structure
One of the most important factors to PPC success. Campaign structure is how you build a PPC campaign.
These are separated into;
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Account
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Campaign
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Ad Groups
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Ads
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Keywords
Your account is the top level where your billing and business information is held. Pretty simple.
Then underneath should be your campaigns. Campaigns have their own budget and target different areas. Also you can separate your campaign by key areas of your business. For example if you are a law firm you may have a campaign for law and one for property conveyancing.
After your campaigns are set up you should create ad groups. Ad groups should contain a set of similar ads that target similar keywords. Using the law firm analogy. In my “law campaign” I would have ad groups for “criminal law” “family law” “Compensation” ect and under my “property conveyancing campaign” I would have an ad group from “conveyancing services” “property settlement” etc.
Ads are next and the most important part here is to have multiple ads for every ad group! So many campaigns fail because they use one ad copy and hope it works. The beauty of Adwords is it allows you to create multiple ads and test them against each other to see what gets best results.
Keywords also need to be scrutinised. A keyword that generates a lot of clicks sounds great, but if it does not lead to a conversion it makes for a very expensive keyword. All PPC campaigns have to have conversion tracking in place. If not you're shooting in the dark. Get in touch with our SEM agency Sydney.
Quality Scores
To put it simply if you want to play in Google's arena you have to play by their rules. This isn’t really a bad thing. Google rewards advertisers who bring to the table better content, user experience and relevancy. Google actually provide step by step guides in what they want from an advertiser. Unlike SEO where there's a lot of guess work. PPC has it all laid out for you. Check out Google's guide to quality score here
Landing Page Optimization
PPC campaigns that generate a lot of clicks still show a rubbish return on investment. If you're driving traffic to a site that is hard to navigate, has no call to action and isn't optimised for mobile you're in trouble. Conversion Rate Optimisation can be the best friend for a PPC campaign that gets a lot of clicks but generates low ROI.
So, is PPC worth it? First make sure you have everything in place for a successful campaign then you will have the proper knowledge to know if other forms of marketing bring in a higher ROI or not.




