Anatomy of a PPC campaign – Three Keys to Success

Many B2B businesses choose to engage in Paid Search campaigns for a variety of reason. The most common reason is to augment or assist their organic search results. But, do you know the three elements of a paid campaign, and how to be successful?

Your ad campaign consists of keyphrases, ads, and landing pages. The seamless integration of these elements is in part the key to success.

Keyphrases are the foundation of your campaign

Assuming you have gone through the work of optimizing your website organically for targeted keyphrases, you need to now consider these and other phrases for your paid campaign. Take you list and break it up into “families” of phrases; those phrases that share a similarity, and create adgroups under your campaigns. Let’s take an example; say your site is all about unicorns. But you sell blue, red, green and pink unicorns, and in each variety you have fat, fuzzy and sparkly unicorns (don’t ask me why unicorns; I often use them as an example to my clients, just to get them to laugh). So, your targeted keyword list may look like this:

unicorns
blue unicorns
red unicorns
green unicorns
pink unicorns
fuzzy unicorns
fat unicorns
sparkly unicorns
blue fuzzy unicorns
blue fat unicorns
blue sparkly unicorns
red fuzzy unicorns
red fat unicorns
red sparkly unicorns
green fuzzy unicorns
green fat unicorns
green sparkly unicorns
pink fuzzy unicorns
pink fat unicorns
pink sparkly unicorns

So you could create a “unicorns” campaign with the following adgroups, based on color:

Or, you could opt for adgroups based on texture:

Neither option is preferred – you would have to test to determine which way to order your phrases, or determine which way you currently have pages on your website (do you have a page based on color or texture?).

Your Ads are the billboard of the Internet Highway

Once you have determined your adgroups, you then want to create ads that are relevant to each specific ad group. We always find that ads with an offer, or a limited timeline, or a competitive advantage work best. The idea is to make yourself stand out from the other ads, and get the searcher to click on your ad. Using our unicorn example:

Your Landing Page is Your First Impression

While I mention this as the last of three keys to success, it should be the second thing on the list in the order of creation. Once you have determined your ad groups and keyphrases, you need to determine whether to use an interior page on your website, our home page, or a custom landing page as the destination for your ad.

Keep in mind, your customers have a certain expectation when they do a search and find your ad; that is, to be taken to a page that is most appropriate to what it is they seek. You wouldn’t want to send a searcher to a generic page about unicorns, if what they searched for were pink fuzzy unicorns, and expect them to drill down on their own to the page most relevant for pink fuzzy unicorns.Similarly, I hesitate to recommend sending people to your home page for the same reason.

In addition to relevance, you want to be sure that if you have mentioned an offer, competitive advantage or a limited timeline, it should be reflected on your landing page.

Landing pages which seek some sort of conversion (fill out a form to get this paper, for example) are the best to track for effectiveness.

Once you have considered these thee keys and launched your campaign, you learn and evolve from the data that is collected over time.