Dear Andrew,

I have recently started my very own online shop selling clothing for over-sized people. I’m also selling on eBay. eBay is doing pretty good but to be honest, not much luck with shop so far—I have only got few sales and all of them were from my past eBay buyers.

I have heard that PPC is something I should definitely look into. The problem is I’m totally new to all this, any guidance would be highly appreciated.

Thanks,
Lusy

Hi Lusy,

Thank you so much for your e-mail.

First of all, here is the Wikipedia definition of PPC:

“Pay Per Click (PPC) is an Internet advertising model used on websites, in which advertisers pay their host only when their ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. Content sites commonly charge a fixed price per click rather than use a bidding system.”

In basic English, this means that with PPC you only have to pay when someone actually clicks through to your website and that you get to set the price that you want to pay per click. This process is really quite simple, so without going any deeper into the theories behind it, let’s go head and set you up with Google AdWords, the Internet’s most popular PPC advertising solution. Not only is this the most popular system, it is also the most far reaching since Google has perhaps the most substantial Internet audience in existence.

AdWords offers two different methods for advertising your business: Google Search and Content Network.

For various reasons that we don’t have time to go into here, I don’t really recommend you to start with the Content Network advertising. In my experience, it’s a lot easier to loose money there than to make it. So for now, let’s stick with Google Search. This will give you much higher quality traffic, and it will also make it easier to track your progress online.

Before you can get started with Google AdWords however, you will need to take a few preliminary steps:

First, create a new AdWords account, or if you already have a Google Account—which you do if you use Gmail—simply add on an AdWords account.

Next, set your country and language. If you’re located in the United Kingdom, it’s best to go ahead and stick with just the UK for now. This will allow you to better target your audience.

Third, set your billing and payment preferences.

And fourth, start a new campaign and set a daily budget.

Now you’re ready to get started with the main process of getting your Google AdWords campaign underway. This will require three basic steps:

STEP 1: Keyword Research

This is a critical portion of your advertising efforts. You have to know which keywords people are actually entering into search engines on a daily basis when they are looking for your products. Once you figure out what these are, you can tell Google AdWords to target your ads towards people searching for these same keywords.

For Example:  Since your niche is the over-sized clothing market, you will want to use keywords like…

large clothing
large size clothing
plus size clothing
big clothing

And the list goes on. Any keywords of this type that may relate to your product niche are fair game. Plus, you can use Google’s handy “Keyword Tool” to come up with hundreds of other related phrases!

STEP 2: Clustering Keywords or Key Phrases into Ad Groups

Now you need to cluster all of your keywords into a few related groups. Imagine that you have a bag of brightly coloured candy and that you empty it out onto the floor, with each candy representing a keyword. From this infinite variety of candies you begin to organize cohesive groups, all of the reds together, all of the blues together, all of the greens together, and so forth. Keyword clusters are groups of keywords that share basic similarities just like the groups of candies of the same colour. Here are a couple of examples:

Keyword Cluster 1:

over sized clothing
over sized clothes
over sized dresses
over sized cloths

Noticed that in the last keyword of this cluster I misspelled the word “clothes” as “cloths.” This is because this is a common misspelling of this word that is often typed into search engines. There is absolutely nothing wrong with attempting to target misspelled keywords as well.

Keyword Cluster 2:

Large clothes
Large clothing
Large suits

The basic organizing principle here is that each keyword group starts with a different common word or group of words, “over sized” in the first example, and “large” in the second. You can use a spreadsheet program such as MS Excel to group your keywords into groups just like these.

Step 3: Now Write Ads for Each Keyword Cluster

Write two different ads for each keyword cluster so that you will be able to test to see with one has better CTR (click-through-rate). Keep the following points in mind when you compose your ads:

Title: This must contain the exact keyword or key phrase that the searcher is looking for.

Description Sentence 1: This is where you describe what you are offering and what the benefit of this offer are.

Description Sentence 2: In this sentence you should state your price and give a call to action.

Display URL: This should be the URL for your website.

Destination URL: This should be the more targeted URL leading your customer directly to the page where the offer described in the ad is located.

Don’t worry if this all still seems a little bit confusing at this point. Google AdWords has an intuitive online form that will take you through each of these steps one by one. Once you get used to this system you can consider upgrading to Google’s free “AdWords Editor” which can be run on your PC or Mac.

The Adwords Editor allows you to manage multiple accounts at once, upload ads in bulk, investigate keywords while you are building your ad, automatically sync with your online account, create project backups, and much more. Basically, it is the perfect way to automate your PPC process so that you can build great ads in no time at all!

And that’s it! Simply complete these three steps and you will have begun your very first AdWords advertising campaign! Just make sure you take note of each of the following important tips:

Make sure that you KEEP TRACK OF EVERYTHING! You need to have your Google Analytics account properly linked to your AdWords account so that you can see where each of your visitors is coming from. Unless you know which keywords are actually leading to sales, you won’t know how to improve your keywords in the future.

Set a reasonable daily budget. You don’t want to put too much money on the line before you start to actually see results. I would limit it to no more than five or ten quid. Believe me, you don’t want to just throw away hundreds of pounds on AdWords until you’ve actually tried out the system for a while to see if it’s working for you.

Start out using very low bid prices. In the beginning, its better to concentrate on writing really great targeted ads that will give you more for less, than to try to buy your way into the market. Don’t go any higher than 0.30 GBP per bid to start.

Now Lusy, I want you to remember that this article is still far too short to give you a full account of everything related to PPC. But hopefully, you at least now have some idea of how Google AdWords works. And believe me, AdWords is your best ally in implementing a PPC advertising campaign. As you move forward, I recommend learning as much as you can about AdWords. You can start by reading the official guidelines published on the Google Adwords website. If you still need more information, I recommend getting a book with detailed instructions on how to maximize your profits with Google AdWords.

Perry Marshall’s “Definite Guide to Google Adwords” is the classic book on this subject and simply can’t be beat for insight into AdWords and PPC. Read this book from cover to cover and you simply cannot go wrong!

Hope this helps!

Thanks,
Andrew

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