Your stunning website is ready to go! Hopefully, you have used all of your search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to prepare for launch, and now is the time to share it with the world. However, the chances are that no matter how well prepared you are, you are still going to need advertising to lure people to your site. Garnering traffic is where search engine marketing (SEM) comes into play, and pay per click (PPC) advertising is the leader in SEM techniques. Unfortunately, getting a PPC campaign up and running can be confusing, so it’s worth understanding a few essentials before you start eating away at your marketing budget.

Set Your Goals

As part of your SEO, you will have thought about keywords and your target audience, and this information is invaluable when setting up your advertising. Remember, a PPC campaign will only work if people click on your advertising and go on to interact with your site. As such, you need to narrow down your audience as much as possible to the specific goals that you want.

Track Your Goals

It is OK deciding what aim you have for your adverts, but it’s no good if you can’t keep track of how successful they are. If you want people to purchase from your site, you need a way to keep track of sales. Likewise, if you’re going to target hits, you want a way to monitor site traffic coming from the advertising. There are lots of solutions available for these purposes, so the one you choose is up to you. If you are unsure, one idea is to start with Google Analytics, as it is free and relatively easy to add to your website.

What Type of Campaign Do You Want?

By far the most common PPC campaigns, at least for websites, are search ads. These are the type of adverts that you see at the top of your search engine results that look just like any other listing. However, search ads aren’t the only option, and if you have excellent imagery with your advertisement, you may want to look at the other choices. Display ads are what you see on other peoples websites and can be easily customizable depending on your artwork. It’s also possible to target social media feeds such as Twitter or Facebook if you feel this is your target audience. Alternatively, if you have a product to sell, there are specific shopping ads available to entice people to your site.

Create Multiple Campaigns

No matter how skilled you are, you are never going to get your advertising right the first time. You will find that as your ad campaign progresses, you will be tweaking your keywords, your target audience, and your maximum bid price. Doing this is all part of PPC advertising, but how do you make these changes if you don’t know how it will affect your results? The answer is to split up your budget into lots of trial campaigns. You can try different keywords, artwork, prices, locations; you name it! Combining different criteria, and testing out new settings will give you the data you need to make changes with confidence.

Decide on Your ROI Before You Start

Your return on investment (ROI) is usually all that matters with your ad campaign. Naturally, you want to maximize this as much as possible, but stay realistic. Use data you already have, and see how people engage and how much return you get per visit to your website. All this information will indicate to you how much you can expect to gain per click, and it should give you a ballpark figure for your maximum bid. However, do be careful, as organic traffic is likely to have a higher ROI than paid traffic.

PPC advertising can be fantastic to encourage engagement on your website and expand your business. However, a misguided campaign can have the opposite effect and quickly drain your budget. Taking time to consider every aspect of pay per click advertising is essential for you to make the most out of your marketing, and get the results you desire.