A Scientific Approach to Paid Search Will Drive Results, Not Just Traffic

As a small-to-medium business, effective paid search marketing is all about trimming the excess fat from your campaign to achieve maximum results, i.e. spend smarter to acquire more customers.

I would encourage all business owners, whether just dipping toes into the proverbial PPC pool or savvy veterans of the PPC realm, to reconsider how you approach campaign setup and focus more on understanding your customer’s needs and how to capture demand by offering highly relevant ad copy and smart PPC management.

Ideally you’ll want to focus on these key elements first:

• Re-identify your core conversion goals. These should be actionable, whether it’s a customer picking up the phone and calling for inventory, service or about specific products, or interacting on your site and submitting forms or downloading promotional coupons.
• Review your site content and segment by creating categories according to relevancy and priority. This is a key first step to determining how to properly set up ad groups. If your an e-commmerce retailer, for example, than key content categories will obviously revolve around your products, but consider delving even deeper and determining priority based on brand, seasonality, etc.
• Start with core keyword phrases and branch out to add long tail (unique brand or product names for example) and geo keywords (location specific, i.e. nashville bike shop).
• Consider separate campaigns if you have multiple, high volume product or service categories. Also, be certain that you don’t dump all product keywords into one or two broad ad groups should you focus your efforts on a single campaign. A bucket approach will simply dilute the effectiveness of your ads and keywords, so segment to be hyper relevant.
• Review your organic search traffic trends and gain a better understanding of your customers’ search habits.

The key elements of approaching your PPC campaigns with a scientific eye will ensure that you’re starting the process with a clear advantage. The above elements are truly just the beginning of a long but worthy and fulfilling journey.

You’re simply avoiding the pitfall of hitting go on your search campaign and hoping loads of traffic will hit your site … and you’ll reap the profitable rewards as a result.

Remember: Smart PPC drives qualified traffic, and qualified traffic is much more likely to engage with your products and services.