Search engine pay per click guide – part 1
Your first campaign
We are going to use adCenter’s control panel for the purposes of this guide, however Google Adwords works in a very similar manner, and once you know how one works you will be able to transfer that experience to Google Adwords easily.
Your adCenter account is structured in to four levels:
- Account
- Campaign
- Ad Group
- Ads & keywords
The first thing we need to do is set up a new campaign. adCenter will guide you through each stage, but a few tips to create a well structured and easy to use series of campaigns are:
- Break your campaigns in to clear, descriptive and broad product/ service titles, e.g. a jeweller could use ‘rings’, ‘watches’, ‘necklaces’ etc.
- Be more specific with your Ad groups, but remain as equally clear and descriptive e.g. engagement ring, friendship ring, eternity ring…
adCenter gives you the option to target specific audiences by country or city. If you only trade in the UK, this tool will help to keep costs down by preventing people outside the UK from seeing and clicking on your adverts. Equally, if you only trade in and around a city, the ‘Select cities within a country/region’ option helps to do the same.
Creating your adverts
The second step is to write your adverts. The screen shot below shows an advert for a jeweller’s engagement rings.
Tips to increase the number of people clicking on your advert and going on to take action on your site include:
- Put the name of the product in the Ad title
- Take people directly to the page with the advertised product/ service
- Do not use broken English e.g. ‘L8r’ or ‘2nite’
- Create a call to action e.g. ‘Click here’, ‘Buy now!’
- Do not mislead or create the wrong impression with the user
Choosing your keywords
Now you have an advert, we need to attach it to the words or phrases people search for that we want the advert to be seen with.
Sit down with a pen and paper and write out a big list of what you think people will type in to a search engine related to your product/ service. Don’t forget to include plurals e.g. “Engagement ring” & “Engagement rings” and possible misspellings e.g. “engagemant ring”.
AdCenter provides a number of tools to help you choose your keywords. For the term ’engagement ring’ adCenter also suggested:
- diamond solitaire
- wedding ring
- white gold
- wedding band
- princess diamond
Pricing
You will be asked how much you have budgeted to spend each month, and how you want that distributing through out the month. adCenter & Adwords will ensure you do not go over budget.
Then you will need to specify how much you are willing to pay every time someone clicks on your advert. This is your ‘cost per click’ (CPC) bid. The more you bid, the higher your advert will be shown, but the more you will spend in a shorter period. You will have to decide how you want to balance this.
You are now ready to submit your advert, and if it passes the editorial review you should be up and running in a matter of hours.
END PART 1
Our pay per click guide will continue with the following parts:
Part 2 – Choosing your keywords
Part 3 – Writing your adverts
Part 4 – Analysing your statistics
Part 5 – Increasing conversion
To learn more about PPC and how to use your Google and MSN advertising vouchers, look out for part 2 in our June newsletter.
On November 15th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
[...] the previous four parts of this guide we’ve introduced the concept of search engine pay per click (PPC) advertising, looked at how to research and choose your keywords in detail, how to write your PPC adverts, and [...]