In any well-structured online marketing campaign, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is of high importance. With PPC, online business owners get the chance to advertise their brand or products even when they are unable to compete with other businesses in terms of SEO. It is an opportunity to showcase your brand with other big boys in the industry. However, when badly managed, PPC can be expensive.

Each click on your ad will automatically charge you with a respective fee, and if these clickers never proceed to buy in to your product or service – it results in a very expensive lesson or tuition fee.

If you are just a beginner on the whole Pay-Per-Click thing, learn from other people’s mistakes. Read below to advance your knowledge. Listed below are 7 steps to set up an efficient PPC campaign.

1. Setup your Google Analytics account and link it to your AdWords account. This allows you to track paid traffic and let it be reflected on your Analytics account. If you have, then ignore this step and continue to the next.

2. Decide on what your site’s goal is. What do you want the user to perform when they visit your web page? Choose the goal that perfectly fits your need like getting someone to buy your product. In Google Analytics, you can set up goal tracking e.g. – track the number of people who get to your product’s check out page.

3. Your PPC results and clicks depend highly on your online competition landscape. Let your campaign run for a few days and analyse your statistics.

4. After a few days, check your Google Analytics account. Go to Traffic Sources then Keywords. Choose the ‘Goal Conversion’ tab, and then select ‘Show: Paid’. This lets you see how well your campaign is doing.

5. Next, open up your PPC account. Here, you can view the performance of ads for relevant keywords. Keep this data in mind for the next step.

6. Compare the performance of the keywords in your PPC account to the conversion rate for those keywords in Google Analytics. If a keyword generates little to no conversions, reduce your bid on that keyword by around 50%.

   If a keyword generates a conversion rate greater than 10%, check your bid. If you can afford to increase your bid, increase it as this will be well worth the cost anyway. Any keywords with conversion rates in the middle ground can be increased or decreased at your discretion. Analyse the data to see where your conversion rate is going.

7. The statistics will always change with time, so observe goal conversion rates regularly and repeat step 4-6 when necessary.

These are the simple steps you can do to efficiently manage your PPC campaign. These are not necessarily all the steps PPC consultants perform. The truth is there is a lot more things to consider and manage. At the same time, different businesses will require different approaches. This guide is for the novice business owner who wishes to set up his own PPC campaign.