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Attracting relevant traffic to your website can be tough. However if you understand the basics of pay per click search advertising you should be able to target your businesses core market, and ultimately increase conversions with these 5 steps.

1. Determine Budget, Scope and Goals

Before you begin developing your PPC ad campaign, you will need to define your budget and goals. Do you want to increase website traffic? Improve conversion revenue? Increase brand awareness?

Understanding this will shape how your budget is set up, where you will be advertising and your ultimate strategy. If you are looking to just increase brand awareness you may think about setting up a “CPI” advertising campaign, which just charges you on how many people see your site rather than click on it. These models are becoming very popular on Facebook and LinkedIn as a branding tool for marketers.

2. Research Keywords

After you have figured out what you ultimately want to achieve, it’s time to create a backbone for your campaign. Search advertising relies on keywords, which places your ad on a page after a search term is entered related to your campaign. Effective keyword research will pull valuable traffic to your website. Keyword strategy isn’t universal, some companies work better by targeting longer keywords such as “pay per click advertising for small businesses,” where larger companies are able to rank for more generic terms like “pay per click.”

Use Google’s Keyword Tool to pull a list of related keywords to your website. It will give you a basic understanding of how people search for your products.

3. Organize Keywords in Groups

Group the top keywords you feel will work for your business, by which categories they fall in. If you sell t-shirts, shoes, and books you may have 3 category sets with 5 keywords in each category. This will help your business organize it’s business segments when reporting, and also allows for simplified budgeting (you can set $150 a month to t-shirts, $100 a month to shoes and $300 a month to books). Your group strategy is completely unique to your business.

4. Prepare Ad Copy

The next step is to write a text ad that will draw users in. You can write specific ad copy for each of your keywords, or you can keep your ad copy consistent for your ad group. Make sure that your ad copy is high targeted and uses a call to action (“Click to redeem a promotion”).  Your ad should always have traffic driving keywords, a specific segment in mind and a call to action. If you create targeted ad copy, make sure that your landing page is targeted with that ad. It doesn’t make sense to advertise green t-shirts then direct them to a home page; direct them to a product page.

5. Report, Refine, Repeat

Use Google Adwords to understand how many people are clicking on your ad, how many people are seeing your ad, and how many conversions from each click. There are thousands of different PPC ad indicators that can be pulled from Adwords. After you have familiarized yourself with the platform you should be able to modify your campaigns to improve key metrics.

Resource Nation is an online resource that provides expert advice for small businesses to assist in selection of merchant services and credit card processing companies.

 

This Business article was written by Shannon Suetos on 5/4/2011

Shannon Suetos is the online editor at Resource Nation. She writes expert advice for small businesses and entrepreneurs.