How to set up a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign

Pay per click is a brilliant tool for your business, if it is well managed. If you can get you product or service in front of a customer when they are searching for it, then your chances of getting that sale increase dramatically.

We are going to show you in this blog post how to set up your first PPC campaign in Google Adwords. If you want help on Bing Ads get in touch or let us know and we will do a blog on that too!

Before it comes to setting up your campaign, you need to know what the goal of the campaign is. Is it to increase sales? Is it to increase leads? Is it to get signups for a newsletter? Laying out a goal makes it clear whether your campaign is a success or not, allows you to easier place a budget on the campaign, and determines the keywords you will be bidding on.

Sign up for a Google Adwords account, and enter your billing details. Then select the dropdown next to campaign and select your campaign type:

Search Network with Display Select campaigns will display ads on Google search results, search partner websites and Google Display Network websites and video.
Search Network only will display ads on Google search results and search partner websites.
Display network only will display ads on Google Display Network websites and video.
Shopping is for Google Shopping campaigns.
Video is for video campaigns.
Universal app campaign is for promoting your app.

We are going to use the Search Network only campaign type for this blog. Name your campaign and select All features as your type as this will give you the most targeting options.

On network options, you can choose to take out “search partners” and only display your ads on the search network. Choose the location of the users typing keywords that you want to target.

Your budget options are next. You will only be charged when someone clicks on one of your ads. The costs of each of these clicks will be driven by market competition and the value of your product or service. However, the amount you want to pay per click should be driven by some maths skills done by you as well. If your campaign is to increase sales in £100 dresses, and you’ve decided your willing to pay 10% for the cost of sale, you should stick to this. If one in every ten visitors buys a dress, and you are willing to spend £10 a sale, then the cost per click you want to be sticking to is £1.

For bid strategy, you can choose to set your own manual CPC, or allow Google to bid for you. We would suggest manual CPC using the method we set out above. Enter your default bid and the maximum you’re willing to spend per day on the campaign.

Create an ad group for your campaign. Ad groups are a way to separate out the ads and keywords in your campaigns to make them more targeted. Using the dress example from before, you might have a dress campaign and ad groups for generic dress searches, red dresses, casual dresses, and black dresses. The generic dress searches ad group would target keywords like dress, with ads written with this in mind, the red dresses ad group would target keywords around red dress and have ads written around red dresses etc.

Once you have set up your ad group, then select the keywords you want to display for for that ad group. Once you have selected these keywords, then write your ad. Save and you will be running your first PPC campaign!

These is much more to pay per click than setting up a campaign, but we hope this post has been useful to get you started. As ever, if you have any questions do get in touch, we are happy to help :)