Pay per click advertising is one of, if not the, most used form of advertising out there. For this reason, there will be millions upon millions of people trying to constantly find ways to improve their individual campaigns and optimise their adverts to gain as good a conversion rate as possible (and, in essence, profit the most from PPC). For most articles that look into tips, they are usually quite vague so they cover the whole segment of advertisers that use PPC. This is not a bad thing, though, since many advertisers forget to do the basics in PPC costing them dollar after dollar. For this reason, here are two must dos you should undertake when using PPC advertising.

#1 Stick to a Defined Budget

The number one rule with PPC is to make sure that you only put as much as you can afford into your campaign. Many campaigns fail because advertisers either do not define budgets to stick to or get engrossed into bidding wars with competitors paying well over what the actual keywords are worth.

So, before you plunge head first into a PPC campaign, sort your finances out. Figure out how much money you can:

• Put aside for advertising
• How you are going to split it up between different forms of advertising
• How much you are expecting to pay per conversion
• What your breaking even point will be in your campaign

At the end of the day, PPC is all about making money. If you are not making money, then you can seriously question how effective your campaign is actually being in gaining the objectives you set out to achieve.

#2 Always Use At Least One Call To Action

This is a tip that can apply to absolutely anyone using PPC. Call to actions are all so effective in helping your campaign achieve that bit more without putting any real effort, time or money into optimisation. This is because all a call to action (CTA) is doing is making crystal clear what you want the advertiser to do. With such guidance in an advert or landing page, the web user will understand how to progress through your campaign one step at a time.

Below are some examples of call to actions used in PPC.

• If you want the web user to purchase your product/service, you can use ‘Buy it now’.
• If you want the web user to engage in content about a new product/service, you can use ‘Read more’.
• If you want to gain a lead using a lead capture landing page, you can use ‘Sign up today’.

The best part to call to actions is the fact that they take up such a minimal amount of characters. Therefore, you should always have enough space to include at least one call to action in your PPC search advert.