How to Select Ideal Keywords for Your PPC Campaign?

Pick and select ideal keywords for your PPC campaign using these simple tips from SEM experts

Pay-per-click (PPC) is an online marketing strategy that is used to drive customers to your website. Setting up a PPC campaign involves selecting a platform, writing advertisement content, selecting keywords, and data analytics-based optimization. 

Marketers often describe the success of a PPC campaign as being dependent on ideal keywords. If you want to run an effective PPC campaign, make sure to follow the below-mentioned strategies for selecting your ideal keywords. 

Do Your Research

• The first step towards selecting an ideal keyword is to do adequate research. Marketers usually make a list of keywords that can be associated with their product and service. A good way of brainstorming is to use a search engine. 

Simply think like a customer and search for all the terms that can be associated with your product/service. This will help you identify more keywords to use.

• It is recommended to include your brand name, product/service features, high intent words, and generic words in the keywords list. High intent words such as sale, interest-free, etc. are used by a lot of customers. Using such words can help improve your PPC campaign

Explore Your Competitors

• Another strategy is to conduct competitor research. There are several online platforms that provide a wealth of information on your competitor’s PPC campaigns. By entering different keywords, one can see how well their PPC campaigns are performing. Thus, you can identify which keywords to target and which keywords to avoid. 

These platforms also provide information about the competitor’s industry, PPC performance, keyword bids, and rankings. This information can help you strategize your campaign.

Expand and Refine your Keyword List

• Platforms such as Google’s Keyword Planner help you expand your keywords. Simply, enter your list of keywords. It will then provide competition and statistical information as well as help you expand existing high-performance keywords into more words. 

The next step is to refine your keywords. Based on your budget you can select a few costly keywords that offer better performance. You can also opt to include some cheaper keywords. Sometimes, marketers get lucky and find keywords with high search volume and low cost. 

• After finalizing your list of keywords, you can use Ad Groups to sort them into groups. This is a highly convenient option if you are running several PPC Campaigns. Ad Groups can obtain keywords directly from Google’s Keyword Planner. This saves you the time and the hassle of manually copy-pasting keywords.

Filter out Negative Keywords

Successful marketers use a negative keywords list alongside their main keywords list. Negative keywords are search terms that you don’t want to associate with your product and service. An ideal way to select negative keywords is to think of generic words that don’t go well with your product/service. 

• You can also spend some time entering different search terms online and see what pops up. If by using a certain unrelated keyword your product shows up, you can add it to your negative keywords list.

Analyze Keyword Performance

Since you are spending money on your PPC campaign, it is in your best interest to use various tools and services to analyze your ROI. You can look at your keyword’s performance. You can also check if certain keywords are only performing during a certain time of the day. 

• Using this data to optimize your PPC campaign is going to save you a lot of money. 

Running a successful PPC Campaign requires knowledge, skill, time, and patience. If you want to learn how to run your successful PPC Campaign, it is advisable to take a learning program. One such program is Local Marketing Vault. It provides expertise in the field of E-Marketing and Digital Advertising Platform Management for businesses.