The Ultimate Guide to Small Business PPC Campaigns

To run a successful advertising campaign for your small business, you must give PPC a fair shake.

Many businesses are laser-focused on SEO, social media, and content creation instead of paid advertising. There’s no denying that there’s more risk in paid advertising, but it’s also true that it is proven to work. PPC ads yield around 50% more conversions than organic advertising – if you’re doing it right.

Marketers are scared of PPC ads because they don’t understand them. In this post, we’re going to give you the ultimate guide for small business PPC. Read on and you’ll see that PPC doesn’t have to be confusing or risky, it can be an important tool in your digital advertising toolbox.

Setting Goals

When you start out on a PPC campaign, it’s important to set goals for yourself. Not only will this give you direction for what keywords you choose and the overall method you take, but it’ll give you something to measure at the end.

Some of the more common PPC campaign goals include brand awareness, offer promos, lead generation, and site traffic. Each one of these goals has different ways to measure results, none of which should be confused with your overall campaign metrics.

Campaign Types

The next thing you’ll need to do is choose where your campaign is going to run. There are numerous places where PPC ads are effective, so depending on your goals, you’ll choose one or more of the following:

• Search ads: text ads appear on search engine results pages
• Social ads: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter ads that show up in social feeds
• Display ads: image-based ads that are placed on external websites
• Retargeting: use cookies or contact lists to target people who have engaged with your company before

Knowing which direction you want to take will ensure you get the results you want. 

Research Keywords

For every ad group that you create, you’re going to need a set of 1-5 relevant keywords for the search engine to target. Look for keywords that align with the theme and goal of your ad group and create a different ad group if you end up with differing keywords.

The keywords you use are interchangeable throughout your campaign. It’s important to monitor their performance so that you can switch out keywords that aren’t doing well for new ones.

Use Analytics

Install Google Analytics on your website so you can gain insight into how people are interacting with your site/landing pages. You can use the information you get about user behavior to inform your decisions when setting up your PPC campaign.

Write Good Copy

Getting the right keywords for your ads and putting them in the right place is crucial, but so is the way that the ads are written. When writing the ad copy, make sure to keep customer intent in mind.

Give them an enticing call to action so that you’re doing all you can to get them to your landing page. Go here to see some great PPC ad examples.

Speaking of which, your landing pages need to match the content of the ad copy – exactly. If they don’t, you’re not going to see conversions.

Small Business PPC Works

Now that you know how to craft a small business PPC campaign, it’s time to get started by creating some goals. From there, you can start formulating advertising ideas and get the keywords in place to ensure your ads are impacting your business the right way.

If you found this helpful, come back for more on business and advertising.