Hi. I'm Sam Stratton, the Digital Marketing Director here at Koozai. Today
I am going to be giving you an introduction into pay-per-click advertising.
There are a lot of people out there that aren't too sure or familiar of the
different kinds of advertising that you can do on the Internet, and paid
search is one of them.
The first thing that we're going to go through, it may seem simple to some
people, but the difference between where paid ads and organic search
results differ. Imagine this is your web page. You've done a search on
Google for greenhouses. Here and here are actually the sponsor paid
advertisements. In this centre piece here, you've got your organic
listings. The bits I'm going to be talking about today, I'm just going to
purely be focusing on the paid advertising.
There are three major players in terms of PPC advertising. You've got
Google, you've got Yahoo!, and you've got Bing, which most people are going
to be familiar with. Each of these search engines have got their own
platform to run PPC campaigns from. So with Google, you've got Google
AdWords, which is going to be by far the most predominant platform and
search engine used for paid advertisers. Following this, you've got Yahoo!
and Bing. They have recently merged together, so all of the search results
that you're seeing on Bing and Yahoo! are driven by the Bing results, and
you've got two sets of results that are exactly the same on two different
search engines.
Following on from this, I'm just going to take this off of the board, and I
want to talk to you a bit about how a campaign should typically be
structured. We see so many campaigns coming here and PPC accounts coming in
that are not set up in a structured and formal way that the campaign is
going to work. Getting that right I think is key and one of the fundamental
things we want to go through today.
Up here we've got our account. Whether that is with Bing, whether that's
with Yahoo!, or whether that's with Google, you've got your account here.
Below that, you're going to have your campaigns.
Now the best thing to look at a campaign as is if you've got a different
service or a different product, you should have a different campaign for
each of those. Underneath your campaign, you've then got what's called ad
groups. Now within a campaign, I would expect to see multiple ad groups all
containing different keywords. So within the ad groups, we've then got our
keywords.
Now the reason I'm saying to structure a campaign like this is you've got
your campaign at the top, ad groups underneath that all contain keywords.
You think of an ad group like a house. So you've got all of your different
keywords as little people that go inside the house. Now what you're looking
to do, so say if we're taking a chocolate manufacturer who wants to sell
chocolate bars online, you might have Twix, Bounty, Galaxy, Milky Ways,
whatever. If you were to have all of those keywords in one ad group, the ad
text that you are going to write is never going to be relevant to all three
or four of those chocolate bars.
So what you're aiming to do is select keywords that are really closely
themed with each other and place them within a group. We've got our
keywords. So now let's move on to ad text. Within an ad group, you've got
your ad text. Ad text should closely match the keywords that you've got
within that ad group. Let's say we are selling Twix chocolate bars. If
you've got all you Twix variations of keywords in that one group, you can
then have ad text that is something along the lines of, "Buy Twix online.
Great deals at online prices. Twix bars are delicious." Link it through to
your Twix page.
If you had all of your different keywords that were for all different
chocolate bars within that one ad group, that ad text is never going to
marry up to all of those keywords and is never going to be relevant.
Moving on from keywords and ad texts, that's what we've covered so far, the
next thing I want to talk about is your negative keywords, which are missed
on so many occasions by lots of different campaigns that we've seen. So
you've got your negative keywords. These are keywords that should basically
counteract anything that you don't want your ads to show for. There are
going to be a lot of people online that might be searching for free
chocolate online, free Twix online. Putting free as a negative keyword into
your campaign level keywords is going to stop any ads appearing if anyone
is searching for anything with the phrase free within it. So that's your
negatives.
The next thing that you want to look at and pay attention to when you're
creating an account is your budget that you want to set. Now the budget is
set at campaign level. It's a daily budget that you can allocate, and that
should be something that you can afford to pay on a daily basis. Following
that you then want to set your keywords or ad group bids. These are called
maximum CPCs, and these are going to tell the search engines what you're
willing to pay per click. So don't over inflate these and don't put a
really low CPC in there because your ads aren't going to be shown.
Now that covers the basic campaign structure. I have written a blog post
that is going to go alongside this video, so do check that out. We've got
diagrams and stuff in there that should help you structure your campaign
accordingly.
The final thing I want to go through is the importance of measuring the
success of your PPC campaign. AdWords, Yahoo!, MSN adCenter, they've all
got similar functionality and they all measure the same elements of a PPC
campaign. These are your clicks, so how much traffic you are driving on
each of your ads and keywords. Impressions are how many times your ad is
displayed within the search results. You've got your click-through rate,
your CTR, which is essentially your clicks divided by your impressions.
Anything above 5% is deemed a good click-through rate, so that is something
to aim for. Following that you've got your spend. Spend is something that
you really want to keep track of. You don't want to be spending over and
above. You want to make sure that your PPC campaigns are converting and
generating a healthy ROI for you. Otherwise there is no point in running
them.
Next up in tracking you've got your conversions. All three platforms allow
you to put a piece of code on your conversion page so you can see which
keywords are actually generating a conversion for you, so another really
important measurable here.
Following that you've got your conversion rate, which is, again,
essentially your conversions divided by the number of clicks. So how many
clicks is it taking you to convert a lead or a sale or a purchase?
Finally we've got the cost per conversion, which is again something that is
really an important factor to look at when you're managing your PPC
campaign, because you don't want your cost per conversion to be more than
what you're actually paying for that item or that service in the first
place.
That's it from me. Like I said, there is a blog post that is going to be
going live with this video as well, so do check that out. If you've got any
questions or want some further information, follow us on Twitter, like us
on Facebook, or sign up to our blog. Thanks very much.