Know Your Audience: A guide to PPC Advertising

Category: Web Development Author: User Image

Gary R. Hess

This is the fourth article from the series “Santa’s SEM“.

“How he teaches this: Santa doesn’t have just anyone sit on his lap, he has kids do it. Why? Because he knows kids are the way to keep in business, and not many adults want toys. “

Knowing your audience is a very important part of internet marketing and here is why: we don’t try to sell toys to adults, we sell them to children. In the offline world the logical way to market a toy is to place the ads where children will see them; Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, or the Disney channel.

Online advertising isn’t different. We want our ads to show in the most logical place our potential customers will be. Using toys as an example again, we want our toy ads to show on websites that frequent. Some examples might be a children games website, a childrens online-magazine or even a Toys R Us type store.

But, what about search engine marketing? We want children who will potentially buy our product to see it, or at least parents who use search engines for children to see it. So how do we go about doing this?

First, we do research on our own product. How old is the child? Will the child likely be doing the searches or will the parent? Is it for a boy or girl?

Second, what are the broad terms that would be used to find our product? For this example, lets say we are marketing a robosapian type toy. Two broad terms used would be [robosapian] or [robot toy].

Third, we check for competition, cost, synonyms, and search volume. There are several ways to go about this. Google Adwords keyword tool does a great job at putting everything in one place and even shows estimated average CPC, ad position and other cool stats. Keyword Forcast by MS AdCenter adds a little flavor to their tool by showing graphs of the keywords history, age distribution and gender. Overture Keywor Tool is still a neat tool to mess around with as well.

Lastly, we select the keywords that have a fair amount of search volume while still being profitable. Since my robosapian costs $20 to make, $1 per click will mean I’ll have to meet a 5% conversion rate. Seems fair. So I head over to Google Adwords keyword tool, type in my keywords with “Calculate Estimates using Max CPC” selected, enter $1 and hit Recalculate. First off, I notice [toy robots] is not only under $1, but has a fairly high search volume. The problem though is that it has tons of competition. [robot toys] is about the same, so I’ll keep looking. [toy robots for sale] and [robo toy] both look promising. Both have high search volume, little competition and meet our budget. But for kicks and giggles, there are several keywords that show no search volume for December, but some overall and go for only $0.05. So we’ll try those too.

Now that I have my keywords for Google, I can set my Adwords budget to $100 and wait to see how everything goes. And since I know some low cost keywords on Google, I can try them out on AdCenter to see how everything goes. Since AdCenter is a bit different, I am able to set ages and gender. The toy is used mostly by under 13 males, but I can safely assume that parents are the ones buying, so age doesn’t matter and gender only matters for the under 13s.

Now that the budgets are set and the keywords ready to go, all there is to do now is set, wait and hope the keywords have good conversions.

So there we have it! A successful (we hope) AdWords and AdCenter campaign set up and ready to go.