Starting a PPC Campaign
PPC can be frightening at first. I’ve been managing PPC campaigns for a good while now, and if there one thing that I’ve learned, it’s that there is always a lot left to learn. PPC is amazingly powerful and quite overwhelming to the beginner. I remember starting my first campaigns and thinking, “Man, I hope this works”. Luckily, it has been a huge success, but I’ve had a failure or two as well. The reasons behind the successes and failures have been pretty clear. There are many, many things that make a good, profitable campaign, but right now, I’d like to stress one thing, that can kill your aspirations before you even begin:
Know your market and your competition.
Some businesses are extremely underserved on the web. These businesses are “old school”, doing lots of business, but run by people reluctant to grasp the power of new technology. It’s hard to believe, but there are quite a lot of these markets out there, and if you have one, it is virtually impossible to screw it up. You could piece together the most ridiculous and undisciplined campaign, and it would still be successful as long as you are throwing money at it. I see it everyday. On the flip-side, you would have to be crazy to think you are going to spend $100/month on PPC ads for something like “Digital Cameras”, because the market is super-saturated and bids are so high, you might as well light a match to that Benjamin. I dare say $5,000.00/month would be the minimum to break into a market like that. Trust me, I tried to nonchalantly bid a little on my domain & hosting service. I didn’t quite account for the fact that 1,000 other companies were bidding on the same keywords, as well as BIG spenders like godaddy and others. Not only were my ads ridiculously expensive to serve, the revenues generated by such low-margin products didn’t even come close to justifying the expense.
When you do find an underserved market, it’s often hard to sell the idea to business owners who have always based their marketing around the old standards, namely printed media. That is changing quite rapidly, and it seems that everyone is realizing that internet marketing is the key to modern success in marketing. The returns can be astounding.
I guess to sum-up, I’d just like to say that this is not something that you are going to be a genius overnight. It takes plenty of training, patience and good deal of trial and error. Research is the MOST important aspect, even with a well established account. If you have the patience and determination to do this tedious part of the job, good things await you on the other side.
