August 7, 2018

5.5 : PPC optimisation

5.5 : PPC optimisation

Dr. Gordon Fletcher, Senior Lecturer, Salford Business School, UK

PPC, or pay per click, is available on search engines and on social media. But it also needs to be considered in relation to what is described as organic.

With organic, the strength of your content is what drives “likes” if you’re on Facebook, drives you to the top of search engine result if you are on Google, but in social media, if you pay per click, you’re basically putting your content towards the top of the page. By doing that, you’re hopefully attracting more attention but more importantly, you are able to measure, through the metrics that are behind the scenes, the effectiveness of your content.

Pay Per Click (PPC) is available on search engines and social media platforms

PPC allows you to have a much more detailed view of statistics compared to organic results and is, therefore, a useful tactic to test messages and content before these are launched through organic optimization

By being able to see how good or bad your content is being received by your buyer persona, you’re able to modify your content, change your campaign, or respond to the comments that you may be receiving in a way that’s positive and helps to encourage engagement rather than deflect buyer persona elsewhere. All of this enables you to measure, to consider, and to reflect upon your project and to be able to work towards improving continuously on the work that you do with your content.

PPC shouldn’t be an end in itself, it should rather complement the work you do in terms of developing high quality, engaging content for your buyer persona.

Alex Charalambidis, Digital Marketing Strategist, MONKS, Greece

One secret in AdWords, especially in search PPC, is that you have to be really, really careful when you are creating a campaign. So if you are using the same keyword in one ad group and the same keyword in another ad group, the system cannot understand that it’s the same client so you are competing for each other. So what you have to do is first of all filtering, and creating different ad groups, plus giving a negative keyword for each ad group in order to ensure the whole process.

When creating PPC campaigns be careful when selecting keywords

Careful consideration needs to be given to the exact keyword terms being used so that your buyer persona is targeted

Let’s say, in the pottery examples we mentioned before, probably someone is looking for “pottery prices”. This is a good keyword for you, a good phrase, but if you can see a query like “pottery examples in order to finish my coursework” this is not relevant for your case because this probably is a student who won’t buy anything from your e-shop. So you are getting this phase and you are adding it as a negative so anyone is looking for something really generic for pottery, it is excluding your ad from there.

Excercise

Read the following resources:

Optimise paid campaigns: http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2357813/10-paid-search-optimization-tactics-to-improve-roi

Optimise Video campaigns: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/3013684?hl=en-GB

Optimise Facebook https://www.facebook.com/business/a/online-sales/optimize-your-ads

Share your main lesson

Share your main lesson with others below. Mention a specific example if relevant.

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 resources

Guide to AdWords (Traditional PPC) – http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/uk/adwords/pdf/step_by_step.pdf

Setting up AdWords: http://www.google.co.uk/ads/new/step-by-step-adwords.html

Paid Social Media: http://blog.hootsuite.com/beginners-guide-to-social-media-advertising/

References

The exploration of internet marketing strategy by search engine optimization: A critical review and comparison

 http://www.academicjournals.org/jo…

Sponsored search: an overview of the concept, history, and technology

 https://faculty.ist.psu.edu/jjanse…

Skewed Bidding in Pay Per Action Auctions for Online Advertising

 https://faculty-gsb.stanford.edu/a…

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
5.6 What makes content to go Viral?
5.7 How to create content viral?