If you're running PPC campaigns for someone who doesn't understand the importance of an organized campaign structure, this template will also act as a PPC campaign management task checklist that will enlighten your boss or clients.
Step 1: Choose your PPC campaign management tools and software.
There are several places to begin your PPC campaign strategy, but my advice would be to start with one platform and expand to another until you cover each channel your audience visits. This tactic works because it keeps your costs low in the initial stages of PPC planning. Rather than paying for an external campaign management tool, you can manage your campaigns natively within the platform on which you're running the ads.
Step 2: Understand PPC campaign structure.
Before we do anything with this template, it's important to understand PPC campaign structure. Far too many marketers will just set up an account, create an ad, direct the ad to their home page, pick some keywords and hit go. This is not the way to do things.
With Google Ads, you have the opportunity to create multiple campaigns. Each campaign may contain several AdGroups, and each AdGroup may contain a few ads and multiple, similar keywords.
It's wise to create multiple campaigns because you can set daily budget caps, day-parting, and select geo-targeted regions at the campaign level. If you're bidding on generic keywords and branded keywords, you'll want to put these in separate campaigns because the economics around these two types of keywords will likely be very different.
Step 3: Identify your landing pages.
The "Destination URL" is the place on your website where you want the PPC traffic to end up. Because there is a marginal cost associated with each PPC visitor you attract, I recommend you choose a landing page URL as your destination URL.
Step 4: Build your keyword strategy.
Next, select the keywords that are relevant to the landing page and offer. Make sure to keep them as relevant as possible to increase the chance that each visit you pay for completes the reg form on the landing page.
Step 5: Create your ads.
This is the fun part! Both Google Ads and Microsoft Ads allow you to create more than one ad for each Ad Group (hence the "group" terminology). The service will rotate them until it notices that one appears to drive a higher clickthrough rate (CTR). While this is optional, you should take advantage of the ability to create more than one ad.
Keep in mind that you are allotted 25 characters for the title of the ad, 35 characters for the display URL (the URL that's displayed in the ad, not to be confused with the destination URL), and 35 characters for each line of copy.
