4.7 : PPC campaign planning
Dr. Aleksej Heinze, Associate Professor at KEDGE Business School (France), Visiting Lecturer, Salford Business School, UK
Whenever you’re planning a pay-per-click campaign, whether it is on Google AdWords, Twitter, or any other social network, there are basic things that you have to bear in mind. The one most important one is the budget that you have and the resource that you have to allocate to managing those particular campaigns.
PPC campaign planning:
- Select the pages to be targeted
- Optimize for organic SEO
- Relevant Ad text per page
- Monitor on a daily basis
Pay-per-click is a great way to get instant results. However it can also be a very damaging way where you leave the tool to itself and it provides you with some results that aren’t necessarily favorable for your organization. So the advice is basically to first of all think about the products and services that are being targeted, consider whether those products and services have the relevant pages that the pay-per-click will be targeting or linking to, because ultimately the quality score of your pay-per-click campaign will dictate the amount that you will pay and the effectiveness of your campaign.
So a quality score looks at the quality of your ad, and looks at the quality of your landing page, and what people think about it whenever they are potentially clicking on those particular ads. So therefore, it is advisable to have 3 or 4 different versions of an ad that are being shared at the same time and they’re automatically using the, usually for example in Google Adwords you have an option to automatically show those interchangeably and dependant on the quality of the ads, they will be showing one that is more popular with the target audience or with your buyer persona than others.
So pay-per-click does need daily monitoring and daily track checking to see what keywords have been used and perhaps reviewing those key words and whether they are effective or not.
Alex Charalambidis, Digital Marketing Strategist, MONKS, Greece
You can measure every action and you can control easier the budget and also it’s really flexible, you can change it within a few minutes.
PPC campaign monitoring:
- Measure every action
- Control the budget
- Change in minutes
Yes, of course, we have – you can create a campaign, as I told you before, with different ad groups based on our products. So starting from search queries, the content you have in your website and how relevant are your ads, but this is only one channel.
Each platform is evaluated by The Candidate Ltd in terms of the options that it offers to engage with their buyer persona
Another channel can be remarketing, which is again PPC. Remarketing is target only people who already visit your website. So imagine landing page, your search campaign, your remarketing campaign, and at the same time a social media PPC campaign let’s say from Facebook. So different channels giving traffic to your eshop. So at the end of the day, you know what is your ROI and you know what is the best performing channel so accordingly you can allocate budget or even stop a campaign that’s not performing.
Exercise
What do you think about PPC tools?
Review some of the PPC management software tools listed in the Additional Material section of this unit and what they offer for a digital marketer.
Share your preference for PPC management software tools if you have experience in this area and if you don’t use PPC – consider how the tools listed in the Additional Material or others can help you to manage PPC campaigns.
Before posting your comments below, see if the same point has been made by others and if so reply to their comment. Once you have posted your contribution, comment on at least three contributions of your peers.
Additional materials
PPC tools
As with organic SEO and general marketing automation there are a number of PPC automation tools:
Weatherfit – links PPC automation activity with weather data
Google AdWords Editor – Google’s main place for you to automate your PPC campaigns
WordStream Pay-Per-Click Management – Pay-Per-Click management software for organising keywords into themes and groups
References
Setting up a PPC campaign
http://www.marketingdonut.co.uk/ma…
PPC plan
http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/…
Pay per click frauds
https://www.wordsinarow.com/click-…
For other sections of chapter 4 follow these links:
4. 0 How campaigns fit into a wider implementation of the overall organisation strategy
4.1 Example company campaign plan
4.2 Key elements of campaign management – Gantt chart
4.3 Risk management
4.4 Digital project management tools and techniques
4.5 Project plan monitoring and review
4.6 Marketing automation
For chapter 5 related sections, follow:
5.0 Choosing the right digital profiles for the right audience
5.1 Facebook
5.2 YouTube
5.3 Twitter
5.4 LinkedIn
5.5 PPC optimisation
5.6 What makes content to go Viral?
5.7 How to create content viral?