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Getting Started with PPC – A Guide to The Web’s Best Resources

It sounds easy. “Just create a Google Adwords ad for your business!” However, not every marketing journey starts with a super successful Pay Per Click Adwords campaign – quite the opposite, in fact. There’s a serious amount of information online already about PPC, so how do we get started with it? Luckily for you, we’ve collated some tips and other guides that we think are useful for anyone getting started in PPC.

Address what you want from your adverts 

Every Adwords or Bing Ads campaign starts at the drawing board. What are you advertising, what will be your key performance indicators (KPIs), how will this affect your Adwords strategy? We recommend looking at what you want your Adwords campaign to do (e.g., bring more visitors to your website), deciding what a successful visit is (discovering content throughout the site, sending an email, or calling your business). Then you can look at how this data will inform you of your next steps. 

Keyword Research

Before creating an advert, you need the driving force to bring visitors to your site. Luckily, Google and Bing both have ‘keyword suggestion’ tools to help you with this process. So, if people are looking for a local marketing agency, you can use “marketing agency London”, for example, along with your location (London, UK) and business type (marketing, B2B, etc.), to provide a set of keywords for potential adverts. This will be a set of keywords – words that Google uses to provide searchers with results. 

Read Wordstream’s 5-part PPC Guide for Beginners.

You won’t find everything you need for PPC in one article – but Don Sturgill, a freelance writer from the “PPC capital of the world”, Bend, Oregon, posts on Wordstream a fantastic five-part series on getting started with PPC. He covers its strengths and weaknesses, how businesses of all sizes can use it, and, significantly, what the ROI on Adwords can and should look like. 

Check out Moz’s Guide to Keyword Research

As part of their Beginner’s Guide to SEO, Moz has dedicated one chapter entirely to keyword research, which helps with SEO and PPC. The chapters are aimed at beginners who are, quite understandably, overwhelmed with the sheer number of options they’re faced with on the Google Adwords and Bing Ads interfaces. The idea behind this is that by providing you with guidance a whole host of resources, readers will be able to tackle PPC independently with no anxiety. 

Digest Neil Patel’s Guide to Bing Ads

Neil Patel is, quite simply, a marketing genius, and he continues to be insightful, helpful, and a staple of online marketing knowledge. His handy Introductory Guide to Bing Ads draws a definite distinction between the differences between Bing and Google – and, importantly, the similarities that will help you create similarly successful PPC campaigns for both platforms. It’s a brilliant data-driven article, even starting with why you shouldn’t ignore Bing as a search engine, as it reaches “56 million searchers who do not use Google.” Incredible!

There’s not much point in rehashing what the experts have already laid out for beginning with PPC. We’re here to help cut through the sheer amount of information on running a successful PPC campaign and provide you with the right resources to get started. Contact us today to see how we can help you.