Small Business

Pay Per Click

Advertising

Overview

I have heard many arguments about whether a local small business can be successful in the wild world of pay per click (PPC) advertising due to the lack of “data” available. From my experience, I have to disagree. Recently, I began working for a local search marketing agency (Local Search Masters) and  I had my first experience running a local PPC campaign. I will say that there are very unique challenges that I encountered such as not having large sample sizes, but what I learned is that it just takes more precautions when creating and executing the campaigns.

Local PPC Ad Copy

I cannot express enough how important the PPC ad copy is in a small budget campaign. In larger PPC campaigns, the budget exists to take more risks with the copy for the ads. In smaller budget campaigns, the ad copy needs to represent exactly what you have to offer for the keyword phrase. Choosing very narrow, closely related ad groups will give you the opportunity to target the ad copy for each keyword phrase, according to how your company is relevant to the search phrase that triggered your ad.

Measuring Your Cost per Acquisition

Let’s face it, small businesses have a hard time measuring the quality of their advertising budgets. Trying to tie back the advertising spending that it takes to gain a new customer across multiple channels is not a company’s top priority. This is where a properly ran PPC campaign can be a small company’s most profitable advertising channel. By setting a realistic, yet highly profitable , cost per customer acquisition, a properly ran PPC campaign can yield a substantial amount of highly qualified leads. 

In my experience, the best way to measure the effectiveness of a campaign with the least amount of time involves running this basic equation on a keyword level

Keyword CPA=(total number of visitors from the keyword*the average cost per click)/the total number of conversions for the keyword

As long as your analytics process is set to track these basic measurements, you can run a fairly easy to manage reporting system. From this report, you can see which keyword phrases are not performing properly and you can quickly adjust your negative keywords, maximum bid, and ad copy to achieve better results. This report also gives you the right data to know which campaigns you need to focus more of your advertising dollars on.

Knowing When to Turn Off an Ad Group or Campaign

This can be the Achilles heel of a small budget PPC effort. If you have started off with ad groups or campaigns that are too large, your data sets will be too low to make an effective decision on the groups success. If you have set them properly though, you should be able see the ROI on each grouping. In a small budget PPC campaign, the data set may not be large enough to have statistical relevance. That comes with the nature of the beast. This is where you have to able to apply your insight into your target consumer. Just look at the phrases that are not working properly and take a long, hard look at them. Can these keywords drive the kind of customer that you are looking at to your sight? Are you stretching your offering a little too far outside of your core competencies? Does your website have content that explains how you can help someone searching for this keyword? 

If you answered no, then you are better off spending more of your budget on what is working for you until you have internally answered the questions that a prospective customer is wanting answered by your website and company.

In Conclusion

Are there more points involved in running a small budget PPC campaign, of course. This is an overview of the processes that I have personally learned to implement for my clients’ PPC campaigns and with the right amount of TLC, I have been able to make my clients’ PPC efforts successful. 

If anyone would like to add more points are tricks of the trade that have worked for them, please post them.