PPC is about raising your return on investment

year, new PPC campaign... Here are some
tips for making your PPC campaign stand out
from the crowd this year.
1. Know Your Product
It seems obvious, but you need to know your
product well enough to sell it with just a handful
of words. Identify its most compelling and unique
selling points, and focus on these – the same
applies for offering services to customers.
Unique selling points, or USPs, have been a
touchstone of marketing for generations and are
as relevant online now as they ever have been in
stores.
2. Know Your Market
Say you have a product that would make an
excellent gift for a man. If you're marketing it in
those terms, write for a woman. Why? Because a
man is much more likely to receive a gift from his
wife than from anybody else – she'll probably
have a say in it even if the present is officially
from the children.
Related articles
Women hold the buying power in many markets,
but particularly in gifts, so don't be afraid to
target them specifically.
3. Be Discriminate
That's discriminate as in “discerning,” not as in
“politically incorrect.” Following on from the point
above, there's nothing wrong with targeting a
certain sub-section of your potential market.
For instance, some people will be put off by a
product or service being described as “cheap,”
while others – many, many others – will include
that very word in their search queries.
The joy of PPC is that your ads will generally only
appear to people for whom they are relevant, and
you should only have to pay if they click, so in
many ways your campaign will target itself, given
the right range of ad texts to choose from.
4. Learn To Tweet
It may sound odd, but fitting all of the necessary
information into the character count of a PPC ad
can be much harder than it first sounds. If you've
never tried it, practice on another short-form text
platform, such as Twitter, or try sending an SMS
or two that describe your product, service, or
special offer.
Learning to appreciate the restrictions imposed
by short-form text will help you to understand
what can – and what can’t – be said in a PPC
ad.
5. Be Timely
Think of the commercials you see on television.
How many of them are simply telling you about a
product or service, and how many of them relate
to something time-sensitive?
It could be a new recipe or formulation, a two-
for-one discount, a competition or a giveaway. By
imposing some kind of time limit on the ad, you
put in your potential customer's mind the feeling
that they have to buy now.
Just try to be more subtle about it than those
flashing “you have won a smartphone - claim it in
the next 60 seconds” pop-ups you see on some
websites.
6. Review, Revise, Reinvest
PPC is about raising your return on investment.
Yes, you pay for the clicks you receive, but in
return for that you get a measurable flow of
traffic to your site. Keep track of your best-
performing ads and offers.
Tweak your PPC campaign to include more of
those successful messages. As your revenues
rise, consider whether you have already maxed
out your market penetration – and, if not, reinvest
some of those funds into increasing your PPC
presence. With the right ad text and a steady
growth in your monthly budget, the overall
increase in ROI could prove to be exponential.
Whichever part of your PPC campaign you decide
to focus on, the new year is the perfect time to
make a few changes, giving you a good few
months of “normal” search traffic to analyze
before major events like Christmas begin to make
their presence known once again.