Pay Per Click Campaigns (PPC) have the potential for a return of double or triple your investment, if they are done right; but to do the campaign right takes a lot of trial and error, and time. Len Morley, CEO of Mx4 LLC, talked about the critical elements of running a successful PPC campaign on this month’s SkillBites Show.

Len identified four key steps that need to be taken before running a PPC campaign:

1. Understand your market. What does your market want? What are their key pain points?
2. Define the solution you provide.
3. Determine the key words that your market is likely to use when searching for the product or service you provide, so that you get in front of people who are ready to buy.
4. Prepare an incentive to build the relationship, such as an eBook or free report.

These are needed to help develop the strategy behind your campaign.

The next step is determining where you want to run your campaign. Google has the widest audience. Facebook and other social media platforms are an option, particularly if you have a large following on one or more social media platforms.

Ideally, you would conduct some split testing, where you run the same ad on different platforms and see which platform responds the best. You would also want to run different ads, to determine which ad gets the most response. Len recommends planning on at least an 8 week campaign so that you can adequately test the different platforms and ads to determine the most effective combination.

If you don’t want to spend your time doing the split testing and evaluating the analytics, you can hire someone to do that for you. You’ll want to review the track record of the consultants you are considering, as well as their experience in your market. Find out if they have expertise in developing the strategy as well as the implementation. You might also want to find out if they have the ability to filter fraudulent clicks, such as from bots instead of people, which Len’s company provides.

To run an 8 week PPC campaign, Len recommends budgeting at least $500/week. If you hire a consultant to help, that would be at least an additional $250/week. Thus, if you aren’t prepared to spend $6000, you would be better off not embarking on this path.

Len’s company not only provides PPC services, it also does SEO, web design, brand management and other digital marketing services. Len is offering members of the SkillBites community a free SEO audit of their website. To obtain this audit, go to the Contact Us page of his website, extonmx4seopros.com, and fill out the form.