Putting together a Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaign targeting your local audience couldn’t be easier: you open an account with Google, Yahoo or MSN (these are the most popular search engines, write your ads, set your advertising costs and geographic information…and voilà! You’re up and running.
Now that your ad is running, what do you do next? You need to manage your campaign to maximize your return on investment (ROI). After all, you’re advertising to make a profit, and that begins with optimizing your advertising dollars. The difference between a “normal” PPC campaign and a “successful” one can often be measured in hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in cost savings and additional profits.
So what’s the secret to highly-successful Pay Per Click marketing? It begins with identifying the right keywords for your local market, and goes on with constant monitoring of every keyword’s performance and adjusting each bid along the way to maximize your budget.
Choosing the converting keywords for your local market can appear to be difficult when you don’t have the right approach. Your portfolio of keywords needs to strike a balance between being generic enough to appeal to a broad spectrum of local searchers, while being specific enough to eliminate those “tire kickers.” The name of the game is attracting local leads that are specifically looking for your products or services.
There are numerous tools that are easily accessible to assist you in identifying the most-relevant keywords for your target market. Some are definitely not cheap and may require a steep learning curve to use effectively. So as a busy local shop owner whose based in, say, Ottawa, you may opt to hire an Ottawa PPC management agency to research those keywords for you. However, if you want to avoid paid tools or services altogether, there are excellent free keyword tools you can use. If you’re advertising in Google Adwords, I highly recommend there Keyword Selection Tool: it helps you not only choose relevant keywords, but numerous synonyms that you probably wouldn’t have thought of.
In reality, PPC marketing is nothing but a huge auction: premium ad placement is given to the advertisers with the highest bids, and also the most relevant ads (more on that below). And that’s the name of the game: you want your ads to be seen more than competiting ads, so you can drive more traffic to your site.
But bidding high for your ads is only part of the story. Your advertising needs to be relevant. Search engines (especially Google) will reward your ads with higher positions – and even lower bids – if they are highly relevant to what their searchers are looking for. Therefore it is crucial that you group your keywords in themes based on the type of leads you wish to attract. Again, you can decide to leverage the experience of a local PPC management firm to help you define those audience profiles and write highly-relevant ads…and potentially reduce your advertising costs in the process.
As soon as your local advertising campaign is running, it is critical that you monitor your ads’ performance: how much are they costing you as compared to your resulting sales? There are powerful bid optimizing tactics that can greatly improve your ROI (you can either search Google or contact a qualified PPC management firm for more information), but at a minimum, you should eliminate those keywords that are not performing to expectation.
Highly-profitable local PPC campaigns are possible with the right keywords, highly-relevant ads and continuous bid management. It may sound like a lot of work, but the financial rewards are well worth it.
Try taking the coachability assessment to see if coaching is right for you.
Mariano M. Jauco has been empowering business professionals and individuals by sharing his knowledge to produce positive change in the world. His personal development techniques and methods will allow you to reach your goals and achieve the success and prosperity you deserve.
To subscribe to his newsletter go to: http://jaucoandassociates.com/subscribe.html
