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The following post has been authored by Richard Barnes, a new B10G employee employed to learn the full ins and outs of PPC to take over the management of B10G’s clients PPC campaigns. Go easy on Rich as this is his first blog post ever! - Paul

Richard is fresh faced to PPC and here are his initial thoughts on PPC a few days into his new job.

I’m new to Pay Per Click and slowly getting to grips with the standard practice. I believe the first thing anyone who is new to this field should be aware of is to plan the cost that you wish to spend.

During my short time of Pay Per Click I have heard stories of people spending thousands of pounds in one day alone just because they did not plan out their daily spend limit. This seems to be one of the biggest mistakes around and I’m always wary to ensure I do not fall victim to this.

Google adwords is very easy to get to grips with, along with adwords editor. When setting up a text ad I have been shown that the best practice for achieving results is to set up two ads that are both targeted at getting the same result. By doing this you will be able to monitor both ads and see which one gets the highest click through rate and which keywords are triggering that particular ad. If an ad is not performing well you may wish to change the ad, up the bid or even add more keywords in order to help it perform better

The idea behind this is to test which one of these ads will perform better, so then you can test the better performing ad against a new ad, this is a continous cycle with 20 clicks on ad being enough data to make a decision.

Remember it is set at CPC so as long as you set out your budget you can keep it all within a spending budget. My tutor in Pay Per Click always tells me to “make your ad relevant and test, test, test” it must target exactly what your audience is looking for and you must have the data to back up your decision.

You will end up spending more and not getting that sale if you take your visitor to a page which is not relative to the keyword typed in AND the ad itself, the user is then left having to search your site for the item the user originally clicked on your ad looking for. Imagine walking into a shop which stated you could purchase a barbecue only to end up finding out they did not actually sell them you would walk out and never return.

Always give your potential customer the information they are looking for even if they do not buy on that occasion they will be more inclined to return if they were able to get the information they were originally looking for.

A great tool I have been shown is Mikes Marketing Tools (www.mikes-marketing-tools.com) this has a great adwords wrapper which will give you a combination of Broad, Phrase and Exact Match, a combination of Phrase and Exact Match, Phrase Match only, and Exact Match only. The amount of time which can be saved by using this tool is invaluable and has avoided many potential headaches.

The reason for using these variations of keyword types is again to test, test, test.

An easy mistake which can be made particularly in Adwords editor is to be sure that your ads are targeted for the correct location, you dont want to target the US if you only service UK customers this could cost you more and end up not returning any sales. Also make sure your ads are relevant to the keyword and use the keyword in the ad copy.

“the better the click through rate the less your cost per click will be”

Always make sure you have enough keywords this will make sure that you target the exact customers your are intending to target. You should write a keyword library for all the possible keywords that a customer may type into Google and then group together keywords based on which can display the same ad (keep in mind the ad should be as specific as possible).

It is very important that you track your conversions and increase your bids on the keywords that are delivering results and lowering bids on the ones that are not this will increase your ROI.

At the moment I think the key to success is to make sure you are on the front page of Google for your sponsored ads because this is the place which will make you get noticed.

I am still in the early learning proccess of Pay Per Click and I have a lot still to learn and would like to hear of anyone who can share in best practices and new ideas which I and anyone else new can learn from.

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