There is no point going into PPC if you have no objective to your campaign. There is always a reason to advertise be it on the internet or not. Once you have your reason, you then need to research what type of people you want your advert to be viewed by. Different 
types of people will act differently to your advert. For example, women won’t find an advert on super cars as interesting as petrol heads. Therefore, it is essential that before you enter PPC, you need to understand your market: know your target market.
‘Why is it important to know the market you are aiming at in PPC?’ you might be asking. The target market for a campaign is if not the most important aspect to advertising. In the end, it is the factor that determines whether your advertising campaign is successful or not. Your market will make it easy for you to improve your campaign because if it is not as successful as others, you can question if you are aiming at the right people or not.
However, you shouldn’t have to make that mistake (aiming your campaign at the wrong people) in the first place. For most campaigns, it is quite obvious the type of market you should be aiming at. For example, a new smartphone should be aimed at techno geeks etc.. Yet, there are still campaigns that don’t shout out a clear market to target at. What are you meant to aim your adverts at in these cases?
Well, you have two possible solutions to not knowing your target market. The first is a simple trial and error method. Although I wouldn’t try this out first, it will help you realise what people you should be aiming your campaign at. The only downside is that you will have to invest time and money into experimentation within your PPC campaign. You wil have to use different keywords etc. over fixed periods of times and see what was most successful for you.
The next method which is a more logical approach is to research your campaign. That doesn’t mean to research who you think is your market but to research your actual campaign’s contents only. Google it and see what other people have made their target markets as. This method basically evolves around the ‘follow the crowd’ technique which in some ways is the safest thing to do. Following the crowd in PPC is extremely risk free as whatever the ‘crowd’ have done is obviously working for them, so why not join them? Standing out in a crowd of competitive advertisers is not what you want to do. Yes, it could pay off but at the same time, the crowd may only be a crowd because they have optimised their campaigns and target markets to accommodate their campaigns and it’s working.
