In part one of “How to start a pay-per-click program”, I discussed the first steps to take in your PPC campaign, which included setting goals, determining your budget, creating your landing page, choosing your ppc program, and choosing keywords and key phrases. I will talk about the next steps to creating a successful PPC campaign in this post.

Creating your PPC ads

After you have your landing pages set up, the next step is to create the ads or creatives that will be shown for your PPC campaign. When writing creative copy, you have limited space, so getting straight to the point of your ad, and setting the expectation of what the user will see when a visitor clicks on your ad is key. You want to have a clear call to action in your ad, as well as matching the text in your ad to the text on the landing page. It is proven that higher conversion rates come from relative ad copy to the landing page. Don’t try to fool your visitors into clicking on your ad, then sending them to something they aren’t even looking for. This is a quick way to get your visitors to bounce, as well as deplete your budget.

Turn Your Ads On

Now it’s time to turn your ads on, and start getting traffic to your pages. In Google, as well as other PPC programs, you have the ability to turn your ads on to run 24/7 or to set certain timeframes. In addition, you can choose to run your ads evenly spread out throughout the day, or run ads until they budget is reached, which will show you how quickly your budget can be reached. There are many strategies to dayparting your ads, which is running your ads from, for instance, 12pm-4pm. These are some of the adjustments you may want to make after testing your ads, and measuring when you receive the best-converting traffic.

Measure Your Success

After your ads are running, you need to measure your success. There are a few ways to measure. One of the first measures is your click-through-rate or CTR. Your CTR is figured by dividing the number of clicks by the number impressions you receive. Here is an example: 476 impressions and 8 clicks would be a CTR of 1.7% (8/476=.0168).

Along with click-through-rate, or CTR, conversion rate is figured by taking the number of conversions, (you determine what a conversion is, this could be a lead, sale, or sign-up) and dividing it by the number of clicks you received. For instance, if you received 2 conversions out of 8 clicks, your conversion rate would be 25% (2/8=.25).

You also will want to see how much a conversion is costing you at these rates. To do this, you need to take your total spend for the clicks you received divided by the number of conversions, and this will give you your cost per conversion. For instance, if you spend $18 for 8 clicks, which led to 2 conversions, your cost per conversion would be $9.00 ($18/2).

By measuring the success of your PPC campaign, you will see how close you are to your budget for each conversion, and then adjust your campaign accordingly to get the biggest bang for your buck.

Revisit and Make One Change to Your Campaign

After you have measured the success of your campaign, try making a change to your creative or landing page. It is best to make only one change at a time, so that you can determine which changes result in either higher CTR on your creative, or higher conversion. The smallest changes can make a huge difference in your click-through, and conversion rates. You will want to constantly tweak your ppc campaign in order to get the best ROI. Some changes you can make are: changing the ad title, changing the headline on your landing page, changing the positioning of the form on your landing page, changing your bid amount for keywords, adding keywords, and negative keywords, changing your schedule of showing your ads (dayparting). There is no magic formula to a successful PPC campaign, the key is to constantly try to improve your CTRs, conversion rates, and drive your costs down as low as you can get them.

Repeat Steps 8 and 9

As I said earlier, you must constantly keep an eye on your campaigns, and determine what changes increase your bottom line. If your changes make your CTR or conversion rate lower, revert the change back, and make another tweak somewhere else. Whatever you do, don’t just set your campaign and go. You should also plan on a certain amount of your budget to be “test” money, as the first shot out isn’t usually going to give you exactly the results you are looking for unless you are very lucky. Managing a PPC campaign can be very time consuming, and changes must be able to be made very quickly to minimize losing too much money without results. If you find that you do not have the time to constantly keep your campaigns updated, test, and refresh, you may want to consider hiring an internet marketing professional. A professional can make adjustments to your ads, budgets, keywords and landing pages that they have learned through trials of past campaigns, and can dedicate the attention needed so you won’t give up on your PPC campaign before it has a chance to gain momentum.