The Adido Digital Blog

This is the first part of Pay Per Click campaign management blog posts. I will be posting more tips and tricks here that will help you manage your PPC campaign effectively.

As new entrants in the market (or an old player with unoptimised website), small and local businesses need immediate clicks and customers. Achieving higher organic listings in search engines can take time, sometimes over six months.

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising can be an effective short term online marketing strategy for managers who are desperate for their websites to be found on search engines quickly. However, small businesses with micro or small budgets often find themselves competing with big rivals, who have more resources and budget to spend online. SMEs have to utilise their resources intelligently and often they do not as they try to cut corners and do things themselves without knowing the tricks of the trade.

Managing a micro PPC budget (typically less than £500 p.m.) is a tough job for marketing managers. However, by following some simple rules given below, they can use their PPC budgets wisely to get the most of the paid clicks.

1. First of all, use your website analytics data to find out some of the keywords people type in to reach your website. If you don’t have analytics code set up on your website, ask your web master to install it - it's a must.

2. Think like a customer. If you were a customer, what phrase would you use to find your services/products. When you've got a list, think again. Check with your colleagues, friends or family members to see you are along the right lines. We've seen that you get the best results if you involve some customers (prospective customers) in this “keywords research”.

3. Create your first keywords list. It is safer to select only those keywords which are relevant to your product or service. Often we see that customers come up with vague words around their business which are not specific to them at all. Don't push yourself to create a "fantastic long list of keywords".

Choosing keywords which have little or no relevancy to your business would only waste your budget. Select only a sensible number of keywords and spend more on phrases which are mostly clicked by users.

4. The next thing to do is to create a list of negative keywords in your campaign. You have a small budget to spend, you can't afford paying for clicks look relevant to your offers but actually they are not. Negative PPC words are those which you DON'T want your adverts to appear for when searching for your services. Often these include the words 'free', 'cheap' or places where you do not want to get clients e.g. Manchester if you are based in Dorset.

For example, while working on a PPC campaign for a client offering “fleet management services”, I found people searching for fleet management software. In that particular case, I added keywords like software, systems, computer etc in negative keywords list of the campaign. This trick saved approximately 35% budget of my client, that otherwise would have gone for wrong clicks.

We will be posting more PPC tips and tricks on here in the coming weeks. If you'd like to share any others, please leave a comment below.