6 Golden Rules of Pay-Per-Click Advertising

By Cheow Yu Yuan, December 16 2008

Pay per click advertising is one of the best marketing channels to stretch your marketing dollars. For pay per click advertising, you only pay when someone clicks on your ads and visits your website - this means that you will only pay for traffic rather than impressions.

Other than stretching your marketing dollars, pay per click advertising also allows you to create a strong branding for your company. If you are providing a professional service such as air-con repair, you will want your advertisement to show up on Google and Yahoo when your target audience search for "Aircon Repair". If your competitors are showing up on first page of search engines and your company is not, you are losing branding, online traffic and sales to your competitors.

When we create pay per click campaigns for our clients, we always bear the 6 golden rules in mind:

1. Always conduct research and competitor analysis. Before the start of a pay per click campaign, you should conduct a thorough research of your target market. It is important to find out your target consumer's behavioural and consumption patterns in your industry. You should also find out how your competitors are performing on the search engines. Type in a few keywords on Google that are closely related to your products and services to see who you will be competing with.

2. Always set the campaign objective. Is your pay per click campaign meant to increase enquiry through an online form? Or are you running an e-commerce business that focuses on online sales? You need to determine the campaign objective so that you can create compelling advertisements to get the results that you desire.

3. Always build targeted keyword list. Not every keyword is useful to your pay per click campaign. You need to conduct a research and build up a list of targeted keywords. If your business sells products directly online (like cameras, books, etc), do not forget to target product-related keywords. People will usually type in the model number or the product name in search engines when they are in the buying process, so you may want to make sure that when they search, they can see your ads that are relevant to the keyword.

4. Always run tests. Once your campaign is up and running, you need to test the performance of your advertisements. Always split test your advertisements so that you can delete the loser and create a better advertisement to increase click-through-rate.

5. Always track performance of campaign. You should monitor your campaign closely. In pay per click advertising, your competitors will always bid a higher price to outrank your advertisements. So you need to make sure that you are kept in the loop. Also, delete keywords that do not bring you much traffic and add in new powerful keywords to drive more traffic to your website.

6. Always conduct a review after campaign. At the end of a campaign, you should always conduct a review on the performance of the campaign. Find out which area you can improve on and learn from any mistake that you make during the campaign.

When done right, pay per click advertising is definitely a great marketing channel for a business. Stretch your advertising dollars today!