PPC (pay-per-click) advertising has been around for a while now, and contrary to popular belief you don’t need to be an advertising master or a computer wiz to do it yourself. There are many tools and tips online that will help guide you through setting your first ad campaign and measuring the results of your advertising.

Before starting your up your PPC campaign, it is important to be prepared with some information:

  1. What is the goal of your ad campaign? Is it to bring more traffic to your website, get more calls to your business, or drive physical traffic to your retail store? Write this down before setting up your ad.
  2. Who is your target audience? Try to understand who has a need for your product or service. Be specific in determining your target customer
  3. Location – which geographical area do you want to target with your ad and why?
  4. How much is an average customer worth to you? Do most of your customers buy your product or service once or is it a repeat type of service or product that you are providing? What are the average repeat rate and frequency of your customers? All of this will help in determining the value of a customer.
  5. Determine your advertising budget.
  6. Google search your product or service and look at some of the ads your competitors use. Try to think about their purpose, their goals, and the effectiveness of their ad.

Related Article: Best Practices For Your Adwords Campaign

Once you go through this exercise, use your Gmail account to create an AdWords account and register in the Google Academy for Ads. I highly suggest you complete the AdWords Search and Fundamentals courses in the Google academy for ads before starting your campaign.

Google does not require you to complete these courses in order to use its advertising platform.

If you decide that you’re just too busy to go through their courses, you can use their AdWords Express platform that makes it very simple and easy to advertise. The AdWords Express platform is very intuitive and can do most of the work for you.

By answering a few questions, AdWords Express will walk you through designing your first ad campaign.  The downside of AdWords Express is that it’s not very customizable and does not give you the full range of tools you need to optimize your campaign.

In my years of managing paid digital advertising campaigns, I find that some of the things I have learned about specific industries, such as what keywords produce the highest return on investment, how to effectively bid, maximize conversions and pick the right media platform based on product/service/industry, cannot be taught in a course.

If you are already doing your own advertising and have some questions, give us a call at 416-268-7241, we will be happy to answer your questions.

If you feel that your product/service needs to be found online and you are just too busy to do it, give us a call at Retailors Group. We help businesses create an online presence, produce more leads, increase your website traffic, optimize your webpages for conversion, and help increase sales.