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PPC: What You Need To Know Before You Start

No matter what size your business is, you need to think hard about WHERE to spend your marketing budget. One highly successful method, used by many companies, is PPC (Pay per click advertising - not sure what this is? Read this post first). Here are a few things to consider before embarking on your PPC adventure:


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Customer Value

Before you begin your PPC campaign, it is vital you determine exactly what a customer is worth to your company and what you are willing to spend to gain that customer.

If for example your average order value is £500, you will need to understand what advertising spend would result in a positive ROI and therefore justify the budget being allocated to this marketing method. 

Conversion Rate

Since no business can convert every single lead, you need to factor in a conversion rate to determine what you can pay for leads. With PPC since you pay per advert click, the conversion rate is the amount of clicks which are required to gain one new paying customer. If on average for every 200 clicks you gain 5 new customers your conversion rate would be 2.5%.

Goals

If your business is not e-commerce or you have multiple goals you need to be very specific about what you want to achieve. Your PPC goals could be sign-ups for your newsletter, a contact number to pass onto your sales team or an email address to use in your database. Think about how you can track all these goals.

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Trial Budget

With both of the previous points in mind we would recommend you decide on a trial budget during which time you can test your above calculations and decide whether this marketing method is realistic to meet the needs of your business.

Keyword List

As search PPC runs from a list of keywords, you should really think about what keywords are going to drive relevant traffic to your site and of course result in those all-important conversions. When choosing your keywords it’s important to consider;

  1. the relevancy of the keyword (is this keyword likely to be searched for other reasons)
  2. the competitiveness of the keyword (what is the bid estimate and what competition are you up against)
  3. Your landing pages – do you have relevant landing pages (webpages) to direct the search to once they have clicked on your advert.

 

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Managing your PPC campaign

One common misconception is the belief once the PPC campaign is set up you can sit back and relax. This is completely untrue, as to ensure you get the most from your budget and reduce the wasted spend you will need to be refining the account regularly (daily if possible). You therefore need to think whether you will have the time needed for this. After all you will only get out what you put in!

If you are looking for further PPC tips why not download our free e-book detailing the top ways to reduce your spend without sacrificing leads...