Key PPC Best Practices (Part 1 of 4)

Stop Thinking PPC, Start Thinking Consumer-Initiated Marketing

Over the past year, several new options (and the list keeps growing) have been made available for online advertisers to create more sophisticated online marketing campaigns. We’ve seen the implementation of display advertising through Pay Per Click (PPC) providers as well as a significant movement towards local and mobile advertising. This movement in the market represents a paradigm shift, from simply a PPC-focused strategy, to thinking about all the channels associated with consumer-initiated marketing conversations.

Several of these options include display advertisements, paid inclusion, local listings and Pay Per Action (PPA). With each of these options there are several different revenue models (and by revenue, I mean for the search engines). Therefore, it is important to ensure you have effectively allocated your budget to maintain your ROI (Return On Investment).

PPC and PPA models are the most effective for the advertiser based on the business objectives of driving users to the site and gaining conversions, whereas a CPM-based model is more effective from a branding perspective.

With each of these models it is extremely important to know what your end goal is and how to reverse-calculate to estimate what each conversion is worth, and through your conversion rate what each visitor is worth to you and consequently how much you should be paying per thousand impressions. Sadly enough, too many advertisers initiate PPC campaigns without knowing what the end goal is. A word of caution: Traffic is not an end goal!

Start with the End in Mind

What is it that your PPC campaign needs to do for the business objectives? What Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) do you have in place for the measurement of the plan? There are many metrics to measure the effectiveness of a PPC campaign versus the effectiveness of your optimization. What’s the difference? PPC campaign effectiveness is judged by its impact on the company’s bottom line, and the return on investment. Campaign optimization is measured by an increase in CTR and improved quality score.

The goals of your PPC campaign should be those conversions that speak directly to the business objectives and business model of the company. When you begin to optimize your campaigns, it will become clear how measuring the effect of the PPC campaign on the business objectives, not performance metrics, is critical to improving ROI.

Next up, I’ll dive deeper into the PPC process in PPC Best Practices Part 2 of this 4 part series.