as discussed, only bid on words that are extremely relevant to your business and
product offerings.
• Wordtracker – a keyword research tool not specific to any search engine:
www.wordtracker.com/find-the-best-keywords
two examples of PPc budget and roI calculators to help you plan your budget:
• PPc Budget calculator: http://www.ppcbudget.com/ppc-roi-calculator/
• Web Position advisor PPc calculator: www.webpositionadvisor.com/tools/
ppc_calculator.php
Lastly, here are some bidding tips:
• don’t bid to reach first position. as long as your ad is above the fold (usually
in position two to four) you should get qualified clicks. Qualified clicks are
clicks from people who are actually interested in your services or products.
these clicks qualify to become future customers. the more optimised and
targeted your PPc ad, the lower the chance of people clicking on your ad by
mistake or assuming you are selling something else.
• timing is everything. consider what day of the week and what time of day
most of your customers will be online and restrict your ads to be displayed
within these time constraints. For example, if you are a take-out restaurant,
you want your ad to be displayed at lunchtime when people are most hungry.
• geographic limits. make sure you are specific about where the people you
want to target are. If your customers are only in South africa, set South
africa as a geographical limitation. Look at your past sales statistics and see
where most of your sales have originated from. Facebook ads has a very
detailed target-selecting process: you can be as specific as gender, age and
interests (more on this at the end of the chapter).
• tracking. If you have a technical or development team who can assist you,
ask them to set up basic tracking codes on all major calls to action, such
as the newsletter signup thank you page, contact form thank you page and
purchase thank you page. By adding a small piece of code, you can track the
source of the visitor and identify all click-through visitors. this will help you
determine your cost per conversion and overall roI.
• Be tough. If a keyword does not convert, get rid of it. You will be amazed
at how many words you think match your company and product offerings
perfectly but do not convert into qualified clicks, especially if you are selling
online.
• do not bid more than the average sale. do not spend more than 10% of
the average sale amount on advertising. If you presume that on average 2%
of people who click through to your site will buy and if your average sale is
r200, limit advertising to r20. divide r20 by 50 to get an average bid of 40
cents per click. this does fluctuate depending on your marketing strategy.
• Include negative keywords. avoid people clicking on your ad when they are
looking for irrelevant search terms. Search for terms that you don’t want to
be associated with your ad. For example, if you are selling “luxury furniture”,
negative keywords could be “discount furniture”, “used furniture”, “student
living furnishings” or “cheap luxury furniture”. add these negative keywords to
your PPc account. this will enable your campaigns to have a more successful
ctr by eliminating irrelevant search results.