How to spearhead an online ad campaign

So, your business has decided to stick its toe into the $16.8 billion (2006 total) online advertising water because that seems to be the trend.

You're doing so because you don't want to miss out on an opportunity to increase brand awareness, develop qualified leads and create new revenue opportunities.

You've researched your target audience, your keywords, and your keyword search volume. Now what?

As discussed in previous columns, there are multiple online advertising venues, but we'll stick with the most popular (and basic) which is pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on the search engines.

10 steps to starting your ad campaign

The three most popular keyword PPC vendors are Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter.

We'll focus our discussion on Google AdWords, as that is the largest of the advertising networks.

1. Create your AdWords account - adwords.google.com

2. Create a keyword-targeted campaign.

3. Name your campaign and your adgroup (you can have multiple adgroups under a campaign).

4. Select your targeted market. If all of your customers live within 50 miles of your location you can geotarget your ad to only show up to customers within that 50-mile radius.

5. Write your ad. Google provides guidelines and even online support to assist with this step. Consider split-testing - you have two ads that alternate and you can keep the high-performing ad and discard the underperforming one and replace it with another ad and repeat the process.

6. Enter your keywords and phrases. Don't forget to use common misspellings as well as negative keywords (e.g., if you sell diamond rings, you probably don't want to have your ad show up when someone enters Neil Diamond - thus "Neil" would be a negative keyword and your ad would not show up when someone enters "Neil Diamond" into their search engine).

7. Enter your daily advertising budget and maximum cost per click (CPC). Depending on which search engine you choose to advertise, the minimum CPC starts at $0.01 (up to $0.50). If the keywords or phrases you want to promote are highly competitive, the CPC can exceed several dollars.

8. Save your campaign to activate it.

9. Measure results: measure the click through rate (CTR) and conversions to see which keywords lead to the highest CTR and conversions.

10. Adjust campaign - adjust keywords, budget, geography, and landing page.

With a little time and experience you'll be generating all kinds of traffic to your site and new leads that might otherwise have gone to your competition.

Jonny Buroker is an Internet Marketing Consultant with WSI -- We Simplify the Internet, serving south central and southwest Wisconsin.