By Hostway
A pay per click (PPC) campaign can help drive traffic to your Web site, especially if you don’t have top organic search engine rankings. Pay per click is a business model that requires advertisers to choose keywords, create ads to display on the search engine results pages and pay a set amount every time someone clicks on their ads.
Here’s a checklist to help you launch and manage your PPC campaign.
Start Your PPC Campaign
- Determine your daily, weekly and monthly budgets.
- Choose your keywords. Most search engines use a bidding process to determine the cost per click for a specific keyword, so the words you choose will depend not only on your business, but also on your budget.
- Determine which PPC program you’ll use. Some popular options are GoogleAdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, Ask Sponsored Listings and Bing.
- Sign up for your account(s).
Write Your Ads
- Write at least two ads for each keyword so you can test which one is most effective.
- Create an attention-getting headline that relates to your product.
- Include your keyword in the ads so viewers will know it relates to the search they performed.
Monitor Your Performance
- Do a daily check to make sure you haven't hit your budget limit prematurely.
- Look at your keywords and calculate your return on investment.
- Adjust your spend to put your money on keywords that are generating the best return.
- Look at which ads are performing the best. Eliminate the ones that aren't doing well.
- Write new ads to test their effectiveness against your top performers.
Running a PPC campaign is an ongoing process. It's easy to do yourself if you have time to launch and maintain your campaign. Or you can hire someone to manage the entire process for you for a monthly fee.