I have recently been pushing to be moved more into the SEO arena at work (I am currently a developer). SEO is something I have studied and practiced on my own sites for many years. When my boss approached me about doing the online marketing for a campaign we are running, I became very excited and jumped at the chance. Unfortunately, my enthusiasm was greater than my ability in PPC. I did learn a lot, however, by jumping in at the deep-end, and came out with five tips I will share with you and use in the future.

The ideas sessions were great--we discussed pay per click, Facebook flyers, Myspace presence for the campaign, and many others. The campaign was called ‘join the million’ and aimed to inspire women in the north of England to think about becoming self employed. “Over 1 million women in the UK work for themselves – could it work for you?”

It was decided that we would focus on Google Adwords and Facebook flyers, as the campaign was to be regionally targeted and these seemed to be the most user friendly means of targeting regions. I leapt into Adwords believing it to be simple to do. I researched keywords, categorised, them got our copywriter to compose some ads based on the categories of keywords, and hit the button to start the campaign.

Within an hour of the campaign beginning I realised I don’t know a huge amount about short term marketing strategies, and, more specifically, PPC. Being into more long term SEO – link building, networking, information architecture, building trust over time – I was suddenly faced with being told that the quality of my ads were not high enough, and so I had to bid more for a term. I was driving very little traffic (around 1/6th of my daily spend) and obviously not converting any

Some late night research later, I came to work with a new strategy. Straight away I cut away anything that was not working at all, which made things easier to deal with. I created site targeted ads with simple call to actions in the title and descriptions of what’s to come in the body. I got rid of any unnecessary questions in the ad text and cut away keywords that were not directly displaying within the ad itself. Traffic lept by 6 times and the conversion rate went from 0% to 1.3%, which I agree isn’t so amazing. But it was progress, mainly through the pain of getting it so badly wrong when I wanted to get it right so much.

Ok, so here is what I have learned (this will be my plan of action for my next PPC campaign since I have now done extensive research):

1. Get involved from before the word go.

Be directly involved in the copy for the site from the pre-planning stages, just as you would with a long-term SEO project. Do the keyword research so the copywriters can base their copy around proven terms. These terms are going to be used inside your PPC ads.

2. Composing an ad follows similar rules to writing an article: tell them what you are going to tell them.

The ad copy should be a call to action that directly represents what they will be faced with when they click the ad. Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them.

3. Avoid unnecessary questions.

If you ask anyone a question, they will automatically answer it (even if its only internal), won't they? Unless you can guarantee the answer will be yes, you are giving them a reason not to click the ad. A strong call to action is key (and apparently raises the quality of your ad).

4. Create landing pages to manage expectations.

You don’t necessarily have to compose ad text to manage the expectations of what they will see when they land on an already existing page. You can create a page to land on specifically for that ad. Give them exactly what they expect to see, and drive them down the short funnel of conversion.

5. Use keyword text in your ad title and body.

This may be a no brainer; however, you have done the research and know that the keywords are relevant and very often searched for. You are using the keywords on your site and your landing pages. If you put the keywords in your body and title text of your ads, not only do they go nice and bold when someone searches, giving them more affordance on the screen, they also become more relevant in the eyes of Google, raising the quality of your ad and lowering the cost of your clicks (and therefore providing cheaper conversions).

Hopefully, my next foray into the PPC arena will be a great deal more successful. If you have any other tips I would love to hear them, as I obviously have a lot more to learn. Many of the campaigns that we run here at the bgroup need traffic in such a short time and for such a niche demographic. It looks like I will have a lot of practice in PPC.

If you would like to know more about our enterprising campaign, you can find details and role models at www.jointhemillion.co.uk

P.S. The Facebook flyer campaign we ran, for those who are interested, cost $100 for 50,000 flyers displayed on Facebook. We targeted females (through ad text) in northern UK universities. We got 262 visits, of which 0.38% were converted (more could have been converted through dedicated landing page).