Bringin’ It Back to the Basics…3 PPC ‘Musts’ For Success

Friends don’t let friends skip leg day (image source), so I’m not going to let you skip these 3 PPC Basics that every advertiser should be doing:

1. How’s Your Budget?

It’s crazy how many times I’ve started working with a client, or done a PPC evaluation, and have found major budget issues. If you’re like me, most of your clients don’t have endless amounts of cash to throw at PPC. So you, like me, probably have a strict budget to work with.

Are you using that budget effectively?

I’ve seen accounts that simply set all campaigns to a shared budget. Why should you avoid doing this in most cases? Because you’ll probably have a couple of your high-traffic campaigns use up all your budget quickly, thus killing the chance to give your new test Campaigns, Ad Groups or Keywords a chance to perform.

Watch this closely. Sometimes it’s best to give those high-traffic, or “testing”  campaigns their own budget so you can have more control of what happens with you (or your client’s), money. This next PPC basics step will help you determine where the best bang for your buck can be.

2. Are You Tracking Everything?

We may think we’ve got all our “i’s” dotted and our “t’s” crossed, but when working with hundreds or thousands of keywords, ad groups and campaigns for our clients, it is vitally important that we double and triple check that everything we do is being tracked appropriately.

I don’t mean just making sure the AdWords code is on the “thank you” pages or whatever. What is most important here is that we make sure we have a 360 degree view of all our sales. Here at Disruptive, we call this tracking  the process from “click to close”.

You’re not currently setup this way? Well stop playing Mario Kart and get to work!

Sometimes it’s a pain getting your CRM to link up to your landing pages, but it’s well worth the effort. We use Unbounce, and they’ve made it pretty easy to sync up to several of the most popular CRM’s so you don’t have to get that expensive tech guy involved.

Why should you make the effort?

Well, first off, sitting in your Luv Sac getting hit by blue shells and slipping on bananas all day isn’t good for your health. Secondly, you need to know what keywords are making you or your client profitable.

I’ve seen accounts where they tracked form leads and phone calls, but didn’t complete the circle and track the close rate and money associated with each lead.

Why is this bad? Because you could be thinking PPC isn’t the right choice for you or your company, when you’re actually making a 3x multiplier without breaking a sweat!

Track, track, and track some more…then you’ll actually have the information necessary to make educated decisions on your PPC.  This leads is into our 3rd PPC basics step…

3. What is Really Bringing in the Monies?

When you’ve properly linked up your AdWords account and landing pages to your CRM, you’ll now be able to see exactly what keywords are driving traffic that is converting into sales.

With that kind of information, you can focus your PPC campaigns and that precious marketing budget on what really matters…sales! If you know your stuff, you know that clicks don’t mean jack squat unless you can associate them to sales. I want to know that if I get 100 clicks on a keyword, I’m converting X% of those leads into $Y!

So remember, don’t skip leg day, and don’t skip these 3 ppc basics. Try not to get too caught up in the things that don’t matter as much. Focus instead on getting your campaigns linked right, and then optimize on the data that matters.