How to get started with PPC & Google Adwords

Using paid advertising is a vital skill in digital marketing and every business big or small needs to work overtime to find a profitable niche in this crowded space.

With so many ways to advertise online, you shouldn’t choose one channel over another one and Google Adwords can be overlooked by smaller businesses.

Adwords is all numbers and can feel quite overwhelming when you start, like all Google products its filled with complexity, but when you break it down to the areas you need to know about you can make it work for you.

That Google dominates online searches is nothing new and although Amazon is catching up on product searches Google scores a whopping 85% according to a Kenshoo study. So it’s fair to say if you want your business to be found you can’t ignore Google and with that Google Adwords.

Before you dive in you need either Microsoft Excel, Open Office Calc or Google sheets, an initial budget and you need to set out realistic targets.

What should you expect

CTR – Click Through Rate % 

This is the percentage of people who will click on your ad and as its call pay per click this rate determines how much PPC will cost you but also how many people you can get to your website. On average you can expect a 2% CTR and having worked a long time in paid advertising I can say this realistic for both larger and smaller PPC accounts as a whole.

In other words, if 100 people walk past your shop only 2 will come in and take a look.

CVR – Conversion Rate %

This tells you how well your ads are doing and you can either link this with an actual sale, a form submission or reaching a certain page on your website to measure your success. The average is 2.7% CVR, but this does depend on what you’re measuring as conversions.

To finally make one sale you’ll need 40 people browsing in your shop, so you will have had to pay for 40 clicks and depending on how competitive your market is this could cost you more than you made in the sale.

Now you have an idea of costs what’s next

For Google Adwords you should be able to find some start up promotional budget usually $75-100 that will help you get started, so do a quick search before you sign up.

Google will guide you through the setup and what tracking you need to add on your website. You should start with simple and do some searches to see where your competitors show up for and then create your first Adwords campaign.