PPC pay per click

6 Step approach for Targeting Local PPC Campaigns

It’s not just your organic SEO that needs to be geo-targeted. With Google placing a great visual emphasis and authority on PPC adverts, you should be integrating geo-targeted ads in your marketing mix. A geo-targeted PPC campaign works best for businesses that perform their services locally and regionally, but sometimes - National exposure finds its ways into to the picture

Six step Paid Search campaign plan for a local business

1. Keyword researchUsing Google Tools & Our Interactive Savvy – We will create a long list of keywords and keyword phrases based around your business and our competitive analysis of the local market.The sky really is the limit here, so we’ll create list that have hits in the hundreds while also aiming for a combinations of general terms with a local qualifiers.

This tool will show you both the local and global monthly searches for your chosen keywords, as well as the average cost-per-click (CPC). This will help you identify a suitable budget to help you achieve your goals.At this stage, you should also identify your negative keywords; these are the words you want to exclude from your campaign. For instance; Mrs Jones may wish to set ‘second hand’ as a negative keyword.

2. Organize campaignsThe second step involves creating two separate campaigns; one locally targeted and one national campaign.In your local campaign, create ad groups for all your geo-targeted keywords; including all your generic terms in the national one. This will help you create a set of targeted ad groups, as well as keeping your individual adverts organized.There’s a limit of 20,000 ad groups you can create; but a top tip is to keep all your related keywords in one group. Mrs Jones would have ‘wedding dress shop Redditch’ and ‘wedding dress shop in Redditch’ in one ad group for instance.

3. Ad copyOnce you’ve created your campaigns and ad groups, it’s time to craft your ad copy.You need to include your town name in your geo campaigns, and your general keyword in all local campaigns. The catch is though, that you only have 25 characters to use in the title and 35 on each line of your body copy.This doesn’t give you an awful lot of space to grab your customers’ attention; crafting copy for PPC ads is often an art form in itself. To help you keep your ads to the right limit, you should use this New Interactive ad design tool.

Template for Google Text Ads

Text will turn red when you exceed character limits.

Experiment. Try out different wording for your Google ads without logging into Google every time.

No hard limit on text length. In Google's editor, you can not type lines longer than the character limits. This is inconvenient when you need to temporarily exceed a limit during the editing process.

You should create at least 2 adverts for each ad group you have so you can test them against one another. This stage comes later, but get yourself prepared now.

Title: 25 character limit - 25 remain.

Body 35 remain.

Body: 35 remain.

URL: 35 remain.

4. Landing pageYour PPC adverts are only half the story though. It’s one thing to encourage someone to click through onto your advert; but another to make them perform the desired action on your website.In order to boost your conversion rate, it is essential that you carefully choose the perfect landing page for your advert. In the case of Mrs Jones and her local wedding boutique, she should direct people to a geo-specific landing page. This can be a page that already exists on the site, or a specific PPC landing page.Either way, you need to make sure your adverts and landing page work in perfect harmony to sell your products and services.

5. MonitoringLike your other marketing methods, you need to be monitoring your Google AdWords adverts.Your first step is to add AdWords Conversion Tracking, and make sure that all your PPC campaigns are linked to your analytics software. This will help you see how each advert is performing; which is generating the most clicks, which is resulting in the most conversions, and which aren’t performing as well as expected.

This then leads on to our sixth and final step…

6. Test and tweakFinally, you need to be constantly testing and tweaking your adverts. Once you have an idea of how they are performing, you can make the necessary changes to get maximum ROI.Remember those adverts you created for testing? Here is where you analyze the results, and see what kind of tone and message appeals most to your audience. Try and appeal to different emotions with your adverts, to see which resonates best with your target market. This stage is on-going throughout any PPC campaign, so be sure to keep testing and tweaking.For more tips on getting the most out of PPC marketing, check out The Savvy Marketers Guide.Setting up a local PPC campaign is a great way to send targeted traffic to your website. And the best thing about this kind of traffic? You already know that you have the kind of product your audience is looking for.