Many PPC advertisers, especially new advertisers unknown to this revolutionary form of online advertising, will find themselves capable of setting up a PPC campaign in under five minutes. This gives a great incentive to get your campaign up and running as soon 
as possible. However, if you haven’t researched your target market, competitors and more beforehand, you will find yourself struggling to stay afloat in the deep end of PPC. If I told you to perform market research before performing a PPC campaign, you will wave away my thought. It is looked upon as a waste of time and in many cases not necessary. However, in PPC it is essential to your campaign’s success.
When you use PPC, don’t think of it as a way of advertising online. Instead, think of it as a business. In many cases, PPC campaigns are used to primarily make money through attracting targeted advertisers to a page where they can buy a product/service. Therefore, it can be deemed as a business. Treat PPC like a business. A business will always carry out market research to see what type of people they are going to be aiming their products/services at. You need to do the same otherwise you will find PPC not being very profitable.
As I have said in the introduction, two of the main reasons people don’t carry out market research is because it is a waste of time and money and can be seen as not necessary. That is why most businesses cut down on R&D in business because they feel they can live without it. The truth is that it’s extremely important. You could enter PPC through two different roads:
- Road One: No Research – This is where you launch your campaign as soon as possible. However, due to your lack of knowledge about your market, your campaign doesn’t turn very profitable and ends up damaging your success. You then make changes to your campaign which turn out to make it successful because you learned from your mistakes. The problem is that you have wasted both time and money.
- Road Two: With Research – You have researched your market beforehand and have a good idea what your campaign should include to be successful. Therefore, your campaign turns into a success. The money and time put into research at the beginning will be less than the time and money lost from not doing market research.
Most people will go down road one. But, if you went down road two, you may find that the rewards for carrying out market research will provide much longer term success as well as being cheaper in the short term too on time and money.
After reading all this, I do hope you think carefully about your campaign before rushing in. What more, the question now is ‘how do I carry out market research for my PPC campaign?‘ The simple answer is to use PPC itself and carry out a test PPC campaign. Due to analytical programs such as Google Analytics, you can now analyse many statistics from your landing page to see if your campaign is a success. If not, you will know where to improve. Through analysing your landing page, you can find the weak areas of your campaign and set about improving them.
