Maximise The Impact Of Your PPC Pilot Campaign
So you know that PPC can be a great driver of sales/leads and unique visitors, but what else can it do for your business? Well, as previously discussed PPC is not only a fantastic lead generator, but also a tool for guiding the development and evolvement of your overall search strategy, as well as a fantastic way of launching online and entering new markets. The best way to do this is via a PPC Pilot Campaign, using Google Adwords and Google Analytics to isolate the the core terms that should drove your ongoing strategy.
Here are 5 tips to help you get the most out of your PPC Pilot Launch, I’ll be aiming to revisit these in more detail over the coming months, but in the meantime, I hope this helps!
1. Keyword Selection
Unlike an active PPC campaign, a Pilot PPC campaign is all about learnings, all about exploring and understanding what your potential customer is actually searching for, where is the volume? What specific Search Queries? Where is the highest quality traffic?
Ultimately with a well balanced Pilot setup, sales/leads will come, however the priority is reach and breadth of keywords. As such generating a broad list of multiple variations, covering your full product/service range, researching synonyms and local variations on terms used is also very important. The skill is to select a keyword list that not only covers the terms you, as the business expert would use, but that of the usually less informed general public. Ensuring that nothing is missed out.
2. Campaign Structure & Match Type
When creating a bespoke active PPC campaign, here at Sleeping Giant Media, we strive to achieve the most targeted and effective setup, evolved over time with the focus on efficiency laying the foundation for the very best results. However as a PPC Pilot Campaign is about learnings, we employ a specific Pilot structure using a specific match type structure that has been developed over time.
Essentially this structure is all about breadth, using a match type combination weighted in favor of the Broader Match Types, allowing Google to help harvest search queries, ensuring that the net is spread wide enough to capture the most useful terms for the ongoing Search development.
What is imperative is that when managing the Pilot Campaign, the creation of extensive negative keyword lists is prioritised and continually developed right from launch. Evolving these lists ensure that the broader strategy that is used will still yield high quality results as well as the learnings required.
3. Results, Results, Results…
So your PPC Pilot Campaign has been running and generating good results, so what do you do next?
There are two key metrics we need to be concerned with when evaluating the PPC Pilot Campaigns success:
Volume:
Impression volume at a “Search Query” level is key! We want to know what are the biggest terms out there, as we don’t want to develop a long term integrated search strategy around them if they will reap no volume!
Quality:
User engagement is king here, we not only need volume, but we need Quality Volume, which has always been key to PPC development. Using on page user interaction metrics like Bounce Rate, Average Time on Site and of course Conversion Rate, we can not only pick which search queries are of the highest volume, but also those of the highest quality and relevance.
4. SEO Development
Your PPC Pilot Campaign has run it’s course, and you have crafted a valuable list of key phrases, that not only have great volume potential, but also are of the highest quality and relevance. Well this in itself will form the basis for an on-going Active PPC account, PPC landing page development and ongoing usability development, however how can this benefit your SEO strategy?
Well these core terms should lay the foundation for your on and off page SEO strategy, giving you the basis for a long term approach that wont leave you regretting your choices of keywords in six months time!
We will be looking into this in more detail through my upcoming blogs, however in the meantime, you should be using these terms in your page titles, meta data, header structure, to form the basis of a content strategy as well as in anchor text on and off page, through link building and internal linking.
5. SEO’cial?
SEO’cial? Well, perhaps not, but I like it! In a time when Social is reaching new heights in terms of impact on search, any good SEO should be considering the use of Social media in their fully integrated strategy. Social networking is not only directly impacting organic search results, but a well engaged, high quality community on Twitter can also serve as a great platform for content distribution, and if done correctly, help to build very high quality organic back links.
So how does this relate to the PPC Pilot Campaign? Well, directly it doesn’t. However success online is all about integration, using PPC to drive your on page and off page SEO, generating good quality content around the most relevant and highest quality terms highlighted by the pilot, and then using social to fully maximise the distribution and reach of this content will overall yield the very best results over time.
That’s it for now, I hope this gives you something to think about, but I’ll be back soon, revisiting each of these points in more detail!
Ant