Google PPC tip #1 – Planning your ad

In these Google PPC articles I will be showing you how to:

• Increase the chances of getting your advert clicked
• Writing a strong, captivating headline
• Understanding your quality score
• And much more

In this first blog post I want to briefly talk about the preparation that you need to take before you put your ad live.

Take out a pen and paper and answer the following questions:

Who is this advert specifically targeted to?
Tip – Be as narrow and specific as possible even down to age, gender, location etc.

What are their specific problems/needs that you will meet when they click your advert?
Tip – Get specific again: pain relief, weight loss, bad skin, hair loss etc.

What language, words and key phrases will your visitor type into Google to find you?
Tip – list a few specific short keywords and also long tail phrases e.g. hair loss in teenagers

Once you have answered the above questions you will need to turn your answers into:

• A compelling headline that addresses a specific problem
• 2 short sentences which convey a solution to the problem

Example:
Do you suffer from thinning hair in your late teens?
Try this surprising homemade remedy
Guaranteed to stop the thinning of hair

Your keywords which relate to the ad may be: Hair loss, Hair loss in teenagers, hair loss at an early age, how to thicken thin hair, how to improve the thickness of my hair

The above is just a basic example, use it as a baseline and come up with 4-5 variations of your advert.

PPC campaign management is vital, ensure you are managing your campaign on a daily or bi-daily basis in the early days to ensure you are getting the right data and adding negative keywords which are costing you money.

Running a PPC campaign can be expensive if you get it wrong – There’s over 7 types of actions you can pay for, different audience lists you can target and different ways to target certain keywords.

When you run a PPC campaign you can use it to help gather data for your SEO campaign.

If you are working with an SEO company then they will be able to best advise you on how to utilise the data better, and track things such as impressions to allow you to get better data on searches for your keyword each month.

Remember to make the headline and follow up sentences as strong as possible, you can even go one step further than me “try this surprising homemade remedy” to say something like
“How using beer and flour surprisingly halted my hair thinning”
Yes it’s crazy and out there, but remember: curiosity, benefits and emotion get your ad clicked!