Digital advertising services

Understand How to Set Up a Standard Ad Campaign

Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing is a form of online advertising where advertisers accrue costs when users click their ads. In theory, PPC is simple, but in practice, it is not easy. The internet is full of myths and exaggeration when it comes to Google Ads. Not to mention, most information about Google Ads is full of acronyms and language you may not understand. Then there are the horror stories that detail how a small business dumped all of their savings into PPC only to profit a small amount back.

Regardless of all the naysayers, the fact is when you get your PPC campaign nailed down, it can be a powerful digital marketing tool. You can control how much you spend, target specific audiences, and drive them to your business. In this post, we are going to break down the essentials of PPC so you can either get started yourself or understand the process for when you sign up for Momentum3’s Digital Advertising Service.

What is PPC Advertising?

PPC is a form of internet marketing. Advertisers pay a small fee every time someone clicks on their ads online. The value of PPC is driving new customers to your website that are looking for your product or service without having to rely on customers to find your site organically.

What is Google Ads?

Just like with traditional organic search engines, Google is the most popular and widely used search engine. Google Ads allows you to bid for a sponsored spot in Google searches that you use keywords related to your service or product. So if you search something like “Best dog food,” you will find that the top few results are prominent dog food-related ads.

Google Ads is powerful, but it can be an expensive journey for small business. Momentum3 pros recommend that you budget at least $50 to “learn” what works for your product. In other words, you shouldn’t expect a single sale for the first $50 you invest in Google Ads—you are simply buying insights.

What Makes a Good PPC Campaign?

The basic premise of PPC advertising is it’s a numbers game. It goes something like this: If you pay $5 when a customer clicks on your ad and they turn around and spend $50 in your store or on your service, then you made $45 profit. This is a success! However, if a user clicks on your website, browses around a bit, and then leaves does not equal failure. They very well may return to your site later to make a purchase, therefore, the money spent was worth it because it still resulted in a sale.

To build a successful Ads campaign, you need to open an account with Google Ads and then you need the following

  1. Know your targeted audience
  2. Relevant keywords
  3. Catchy Ad Copy/Content
  4. A top-notch landing page

Don’t worry, we can break down this list:

Know your Audience

Any type of marketing whether it be your website, your business card, or a radio commercial, it’s best to know your audience and PPC is no different. By knowing your audience (people in Tulsa, OK, basic demographic information, etc.) you can target them the most within your campaign. Showing your ads to relevant people is the first step to a successful campaign.

Relevant Keywords

Your entire PPC campaign is built on keywords.

I will be the first to admit that researching and choosing the right keywords for any internet marketing campaign can be time consuming, but it’s also the foundation of success for this type of advertising. Google processes over 40K searches every second equaling over 5.5 billion search queries per day! Think about how many words that is: A LOT!

It is not enough to trust your gut when it comes to selecting the right keywords for your campaign. Here’s my strategy for selecting the right keywords for a campaign:

  1. I develop a short list of words that relate to my niche. For example, if I was running that campaign to sell tennis shoes, I would have a list that looked something like this:
    1. Shoes
    2. Tennis Shoes
    3. Shoes for Sports
    4. Walking Shoes
    5. Running shoes
    6. Athletic shoes
    7. Shoes for men
    8. Shoes for women
  2. I would use tools like the Google Ads Keyword Planner to check the most popular searches related to shoes in my area and select specific keywords that are searched for in my area.
    keywords for google ads
  3. Another important thing I consider when selecting keywords is the cost. If one phrase costs more per click than another, it might be best for me to wait to target that word until I get a feel for how my campaign is going to work out. I don’t want to spend my daily budget on a single click or two.
  4. I’m going to give away a little PPC pro-tip: Don’t forget about negative keywords. Negative keywords are phrases or single words that may be related to your selected keywords but have nothing to do with the product or brand that you are promoting. Since we are targeting shoes, you may want to add “Shoe-string budget” to your list of negative keywords because this doesn’t apply to your product. This will help you save money instead of wasting it on irrelevant clicks.

How to Create PPC Ads

There are three major parts in a PPC ad: a headline, a display URL, and a description. There are also strict word/character count limitations so you will need to be crafty and creative when you write your ads. Descriptions are allowed 90 characters and your headlines are allowed 30.

how to create google ads

Consider your landing page: The most successful campaigns target very specific needs of customers and drive them straight to a webpage that will deliver what they are searching for. Usually, the website’s homepage is not specific enough for a PPC campaign. For example, if we were creating a Momentum3 ad campaign for SEO, we would send you to this page instead of our homepage. This just eliminates steps for the user and ensures that they get the information they were looking for.

Types of PPC Ads

Everything we have discussed up to this point has been about Standard PPC ads, but there are multiple kinds of Ads and various platforms you can advertise on as well including sites like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and more. We’re sticking with Google’s platform though so let’s look at the different types of Standard Google Ads you can run.

Responsive Ads: Responsive Ads are still being beta tested and are not available to all marketers yet. They are another way to let machine learning do some of the work for you. Instead of having to create multiple ads based around your keywords, you can create one master ad that features up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions. Google then takes your input and builds an ad specific to the user’s search query.

Dynamic Ads: Dynamic Ads are a bit tricky. They are designed for advertisers with often-changing inventory because Google automatically generates Ad content based on the advertiser’s template and by looking at their website. Google will display your ads automatically in response to search terms that they think are a good match.

To create a dynamic ad, the advertiser would input their website URL or a range of URLs (For example, if you wanted to advertise men’s shoes, you would put a range of URLs for pages that sell men’s shoes) and select a bid price based on their sales expectation. Google will then crawl the pages you submitted regularly and update the ads based on your available inventory.

Remarketing

Have you ever “googled” something and then moments later find a related ad in your Facebook feed? You’re not crazy. This is a real-life marketing technique called remarketing. When you visit a website related to your search (Men’s running shoes, for example), a snippet of code is saved to your phone’s cache and then it is shared to other apps like Facebook, websites that hosts ads, and even Youtube.

The theory behind remarketing is to increase your brand awareness and remind your audience to make a purchase from your site.

PPC Wrap-Up

Remember, Google Ads is not a one-and-done type of program. You cannot simply set up your campaign and then leave it to do all of the work. Check back in on your running campaigns frequently to ensure that they are working and attracting the right customers. If you find that certain ads are more relevant to users, you can write similar ads to run alongside the existing ads and so forth.

If PPC still overwhelms you, you must first know you are not alone. Momentum3 Growth is here to help solve all of your digital advertising needs. If you have a campaign already going, we can help you improve it or we can build a brand new one from scratch. Contact us today for a quote!