Online advertising is dominated by pay per click advertising simply because it is one of, if not the, most effective way to promote for a business to increase the business’ ROI (Return On Investment). Along with being a flexible solution to advertising with accurate and consistant results for both small and large budgets, PPC is the perferred choice many businesses.

However, if you are just starting out in PPC and are looking to create your first campaign, it can be quite daunting to make sure you achieve a good ROI from your first campaign. After all, advertising campaigns have the main objective to contribute to being a catalyst to increase your business’ profits. For this reason, here are some tips beginners of PPC advertising can take note of.

#1 Test PPC Keywords

One of the most important aspects to a PPC campaign is in your choice of keywords you choose to target. If you choose the wrong keywords, the following drawbacks could happen:

• You target the wrong audience, wasting away your budget gaining clicks to traffic that is unlikely to convert.
• You target the correct audience. However, in doing so using high demand keywords and ones with lots of competition, your PPC campaign’s CPC is extremely high, resulting in not much traffic for your allocated PPC budget.

For this reason, it is vital to make sure you do a lot of research into your sector you want to advertise in to see:

1. The search volumes for the keywords.
2. The CPC/price of the keyword in AdWords.

This can be done by using Google Trends and Google AdWords Keyword Planner to provide an insight into the keywords you are thinking of choosing for your campaign.

#2 A/B Test Your Campaign

I cannot stress enough how important it is to new campaigns in PPC to conduct A/B testing. This is the term that defines when you ‘split’ a campaign in 2+ separate mini-campaigns that are slightly different from one another to see how the results vary between them. An example could be:

• A PPC campaign trying to sell Nike shoes:
  • The first ‘A’ campaign could target using the keyword ‘buy sports shoes’.
  • The second ‘B’ campaign is exactly the same as the ‘A’ campaign, except the keyword that is being targeted is ‘buy nike shoes’.

The whole point of A/B testing is to produce quantifiable results as to what works best for your campaign and stick to it. As much as I could say that the ‘A’ campaign would be best because of ‘x’ and ‘y’ reasons, you can never be 100% sure until you A/B test.

For new campaigns I would recommend to continually conduct A/B testing with slight variations on your campaign, so you are constantly looking to improve it until the difference between the ‘A’ and ‘B’ campaigns are negligible.