When planning a search engine marketing / pay per click campaign, the first step is to choose the key phrases that you want your ppc ads to appear for.  These are the phrases that, when searched for, will lead people to your listings and your pages.

There are a few tools that can assist your search engine marketing key phrase selection. They include:

• Yahoo! Search Marketing Keyword Assistant
• Miva Keyword Generator
• Google’s Keyword Tools
• Wordtracker

Search Engine Marketing -  Campaign planning

Campaign planning is the next stage of your search engine marketing / pay per click activity. This involves taking your final list of key phrases and using the providers’ tools to calculate the amount of traffic you could expect from running the phrases and at what cost.

Search Engine Marketing Creatives – writing your pay per click ads

When creating your PPC ads the challenge is to:

• Create an ad which generates responses.
• Create an ad which generates as many quality responses as possible.
• Create an ad which generates as many quality responses as possible and as few untargeted responses as possible.

There are a few elements you have to take into consideration when creating your titles and descriptions in order to achieve the above.

The first consideration is character length. Each of the providers has character restrictions which must be adhered to.  They are as follows:

The search engine marketing / pay per click providers also have guidelines regarding the content of ppc ads. They include:

• There must be substantial content on the site that is clearly and obviously relevant to the search term.
• Must include the search term in your title and description (this does not apply to Google).
• Must not use superlatives (e.g. World’s Greatest, Biggest or Best) in your title and description.
• Must not contain universal call-to-action phrases such as ‘click here’, ‘link here’ or ‘visit this link’ (Google only).
• Must not use exclamation points or unnecessary capitalisation (Google will accept one exclamation point in the description).
• Must not use symbols; e.g, & and £)(this does not apply to Google).
• Must not use repetition.
• Must have a functional URL.

In the next Search Engine Marketing post, we’ll cover Creative Top Tips …