Pay per click marketing is becoming the way to advertise on the internet. Hundreds if not thousands of people are joining programs such as Google AdWords to use PPC advertising as a way of advertising their websites, products or services. However, a lot of new advertisers will enter PPC advertising without any knowledge on it and will spend money straight away. I can safely say that a new advertiser’s PPC campaign won’t be as cost-efficient as one of an experienced PPC advertiser. Why? Experience. Learning from mistakes. This is what I hope for you to learn today. There’s two ways you can learn from mistakes. You can learn from your own mistakes or others. Here are common do’s and don’ts of PPC advertising which will help you learn from the success and mistakes of other advertisers.

Do’s of PPC 

• Do research the market before you start! – Starting a campaign without knowledge on your section of the market is like a first time swimmer jumping into a pool without a life jacket. It’s almost compulsory you check out competitor’s websites, competitor’s adverts, your market, keyword popularity using Google Keyword Tool and more.
• Do create an effective advert – This is obvious but if you don’t know how to create an advert which will get clicks and conversions, check out another article I done ‘Create the Perfect PPC Advert’.
• Do experiment! – Although I will be contradicting myself with the my article I linked to above, there is no perfect PPC campaign. PPC advertising is open always optimisation. There are always room for improvement. Therefore, don’t be scared to change your campaign if it’s not performing well.
• Do only create a PPC campaign if you need to – Ask yourself the question if advertising is the best option for you and your situation? Many people use PPC not because of the effectiveness of it but because it’s convenient. Do not choose your advertising type due to convenient. Just you think, if you had spent that extra 10 minutes more on affiliate advertising, you could have got better results on your advertising campaign.

Don’ts of PPC

• Don’t bid too high when starting your campaign off – You will want to get the right CPC for your adverts as quick as possible to produce best cost-efficiency for your campaign. What thing you do not want to do is aim high then go low. Aiming for a high CPC then going low will just lose you an unnecessary amount of money. Start low and if your not getting many clicks and impressions, edge the price up daily.
• Don’t ever guess – This could be from cost per click to impressions to conversion rate, don;t ever guess anything without having evidence or previous statistics to back it up. With the increase competition on AdWords and updates to Google’s search engine such as Google Panda, expect the unexpected.
• Don’t have an unrelated landing page to your advert – You could have made the best PPC campaign and achieved the best conversion rate. However, if your landing page is irrelevant to your advert, it is pointless in doing the whole campaign. People will click on your adverts because they read your advert and want to ‘get what the advert said it will give’ or ‘find out more information displayed in the advert’. If your landing page does neither, start rethinking what your landing page’s purpose and change it.
• Don’t ever spend too much time on your PPC campaign – Over thinking your advertising campaign can cause the effectiveness for your overall campaign to decrease. Over thinking your advert will make it harder for readers to understand your advert. Make it simple, to the point.

There you have it. Four do’s and four don’ts to help you get your PPC campaign going. Implementing the above into your campaign will secure you solid place to improve on. After that, it’s your job to then tweak your campaign to make it custom to your needs!
A great article on pay per click marketing to celebrate my 17th birthday. Happy birthday to me!