Determining a Visitor's Worth
It is important for advertisers to establish the worth of a visitor. Firstly, the maximum cost per customer acquisition needs to be established. Then an average cost per click needs to be calculated. For example, if a sale is made after every 100 visitors to a website at a cost of $50, then the average cost per click is $0.50. Now, if the average profit from a sale is also $50 then the advertiser is breaking even on his/her advertising spend. In order to make a profit the average cost per click needs to be less than $0.50. If the average cost per click rises above $0.50, PPC advertising becomes unprofitable.
Determining the Target Audience
It is vital that advertisers establish who their target market is for all forms of advertising including PPC. Firstly, the geographic location of the target market needs to be decided. If a business ships its products worldwide, like Amazon.com, then an international audience should be targeted. If the business only ships within a single country like South Africa then only that country should be targeted. Futhermore, if a business like a furniture removals company can only provide its services to people within a specific city or region, then only people from this area should be targeted. Google allows advertisers to choose whether to target an international audience, individual countries or even areas defined by latitudes and longitudes. Other factors regarding the target audience like age, education and economic level should also be kept in mind.
Analysing the Website
The website should be analysed to determine the potential success of a PPC campaign. If a PPC campaign drives traffic to a poorly designed site the likelihood of success is minimal. In cases like this, a company’s money would be better spent on improving the website.
The site should also be analysed in order to determine likely landing pages. PPC allows advertisers to choose where on a site the visitors should be sent when they click through on an ad. Every keyword can have its own destination (landing page). For example, if a business sells a vacuum cleaner called the “lx5 SuperVac” they should send visitors who click on their ad to the page containing information of this product. This eliminates the need for the visitor to navigate from the homepage to this product page and potentially “getting lost”.
Selecting Keyphrases
Keyword research is vital to the success of a PPC campaign. Unlike typical search engine optimization, there aren't limits on the number of phrases to target. There is no extra cost for adding keywords/keyphrases therefore lists of thousands or even tens of thousands of keywords are possible. Having large lists of keywords doesn’t mean that they will all be searched for. Under-performing keywords have no effect on the campaign and lie dormant until someone finally does search for them. Creating a keyword list can be done as follows:
1. If many unique products are being advertised, create a list of them and their variations. For example, if a “Hexagid 300tdI Magtor” is one of the products the following variations are possible: “Hexagid 300tdI Magtor”, “Hexagid”, “Hexagid 300tdI”, “Hexagid Magtor”, “300tdI”, “300tdI Magtor” and “Magtor”.
2. Then produce a list of brand names like “Sony”, “Aiwa”, and “Toshiba” etc.
3. Lastly, create a list of the core products or services on offer like “music centres”, “buy hifi”, “electronics shop”, “audio equipment” etc.
Make use of a keyword combination tool to get every variation possible. It is also wise to include misspellings, plurals, abbreviations and keyphrases without spaces.
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