Pay per click advertising is great in the sense that it is completely flexible to the advertiser’s needs. It’s versatility is one of the many reasons why so many people use PPC and AdWords around the world. PPC makes it possible to adopt and implement many different types of campaigns. The approach an advertiser takes to PPC must reflect what s/he is trying to achieve in terms of results. Therefore, here are three different PPC strategies advertisers could implement into their campaign to make it successful and effective.

In general, PPC is very similar to the advertising sector of a business. Therefore, this should help us draw comparisons between the advertising strategies of businesses and PPC advertisers.

Short Sweet Strategy

This strategy to PPC involves creating a campaign for a short amount of time (say a month). The idea behind this is to get as much contextual traffic as soon as possible so that the results are instant helping the advertise benefit incredibly in the short term. More reasons behind doing this type of strategy are below:

• To react to real life events. If something has happened and is gaining a lot of publicity, it is only right that it is possible to get some of that publicity by linking your campaign to it in the short term. An example might be your country winning the soccer world cup this year and since everyone is on a high about it, you can link your campaign to this event to benefit too.
• To increase cash flow. The problem some advertisers have in PPC is cash flow. Ideally, we all want cash flow to be positive but it can sometimes slip into the red. A short-term strategy can do wonders in helping your cash flow problems since short term campaigns have the tendency to great lots of cash fast. This will help you fund more money into the long term campaigns you are running.

Although to generate lots of traffic fast you might have to increase your CPC to outbid competitors, the results you will gain from targeting better traffic to your landing page will pay off.

Long Term Strategy

The long term campaign, as it says in the name, is a campaign which looks to generate a steady flow of traffic. For this reason, the CPC is usually a lot lower than a short sweet strategy since the urgency for traffic is lower. Generally, a long term strategy needs a lot of thought to create one since it needs to be optimised as best as possible to become as efficient as possible.

Most PPC campaign have a long term strategy since a short term strategy can only last so long and for most advertisers, the constant update of a short term strategy is too much: advertisers like the idea of creating a campaign and leaving it to do the work.

‘Shot in the Dark’ Strategy

As much as there is help for advertisers to improve their campaign, the best way to improve a campaign is by trial and error. Not every tip on the internet will help every campaign: only you as the advertiser to your own campaign can truly improve your campaign. Therefore, I find it is a great help to set aside some of the advertising budget to create a duplicate campaign and experiment with it changing one variable at a time to see how it affects the statistics of the campaign. From then on, you can see what works and what doesn’t so you can put the good changes into your actual campaign.