Google Adwords PPC: Questions You Need To Ask

Having optimised adwords accounts since the Overture days, it has struck me how the vast majority of Adwords users/companies don’t really know what they are buying.

When you buy advertising space or PR, you would normally expect to have a meeting with a sales rep, get shown everything about the product/service you are buying and work out which advertising space, which message and which price suits you best. In short, you would evaluate most marketing channels in details to ensure they fit into your marketing mix.

Yet with Google Adwords there still seems to be a strange ‘lets do Adwords’ approach to things, with many marketing managers and directors already committed to doing ‘Google’ far before the above process has even started.

So what questions should you be asking at this stage?

1. What are our ‘SMART’ objectives?

This means defining your maximum feasible CPA (cost per acquisition or conversion), your minumum volume and the timeframe in which you want to achieve these 2 targets. It is not simply saying lets see what happens!

2. What will our daily budget be and how many clicks can we expect to buy with that budget?

Just deciding on a budget is almost meaningless if you are serious about PPC. When you do PPC, you buy clicks and turn these clicks into profit – so you need to know how many clicks you are buying to make genuine estimations on what you can expect to pull out the other side. If we say the average website has a 5% conversion rate then you’ll need 20 clicks to get one customer. Google’s Keyword Tool will tell you what kind of cost-per-click to expect for a given keyword, meaning you can then plug the figures in and make some forecasts.

Furthermore, from an optimisation point of view, we always say that, to make a valid judgement on whether a keyword is working for you or not, we need 200 clicks for that keyword. The faster those clicks happen, the faster your campaign will be optimised so, generally, the more you spend the better value you’ll get for your clicks because we can optimise sooner and get those extra conversions coming through.

3. How are we going to measure success?

For e-Commerce sites, this is something we can do for you using Google Analytics. If your aim is to generate leads for offline selling then we’ll need to look how we can streamline Adwords with your database. Many lead generation businesses successfully implement Adwords conversion tracking yet are still largely blind to what is making them successful because they cannot see which keywords are actually producing the sales.

4. Do we have a good landing page?

A good landing page is one which continues the ‘scent’ that the user’s search query follows. Therefore, as a starting point you want a landing page which targets the most popular keywords that you think users will type in and one that corresponds closely with the message being conveyed in your Google Ad Text.

If you’re addressing the above 4 points then you’re in a good position to start PPC. If not… then we’d really recommend you stop spending money on Adwords now and spend a bit of time answering these questions!

If you’d like some help preparing for PPC marketing, feel free to give us a call on 020 3 239 8565 or email us at ppc@managed-ppc.co.uk.

Alternatively – you can use our online form and we’ll give you a call back.