Five Ms of Pay per Click marketing every online marketer should know about

Pay per click (PPC) marketing is one of the most effective and fastest ways to drive highly targeted traffic to your website… so long as it’s done right. You make one mistake when designing or executing the campaign and you run the risk of losing a ton of traffic and sales. But hey! You don’t need to be reluctant about adopting this marketing technique yet. Here are five Ms of PPC marketing that will assist you in designing and executing a PPC campaign effectively.

MISSION

Identify the objective of the pay per click marketing campaign clearly: is it to encourage brand awareness? Or is it to drive traffic to let people read articles or buy something through your website or register as a member?

MARKET

Narrow down your target market – whether it’s defined by geography, age, gender or particular search terms. In the context of online marketing, the last one is extremely critical, because the keywords used in a search engine demonstrate a certain intent and interest. As a marketer, your objective is to capitalise on that intent and interest.

MONEY

How much do you spend? How much do you need to spend? While you may have decided the budget ahead of time, you may have to alter and adjust the budgetary allocations while setting up the campaign. The most popular PPC engines use variants of an auction model, where how much an advertiser is willing to pay has a significant bearing on the exposure the ad is going to get. Bidding is a dynamic process and a PPC campaign manager needs to monitor the bids and the money being spent on the campaign.

MESSAGE

Like any other form of online marketing, the importance of the message cannot be overstated. Can you get the right user to click on your ad? The success of your campaign depends on whether you’ve been able to attract the user to the target website, and the quality and clarity of that message will determine whether the user does that.

MEASUREMENT

One of the best things about online marketing is the availability of sophisticated reporting mechanisms that can provide vital insights into your campaign. With statistics on the campaign available as close to real-time as possible, you don't have to wait to do post-mortems of money-down-the-drain scenarios. Instead, you can quickly adopt the "market, measure, modify, market" cycle to optimise your campaign and increase your ROIs.

So these are the five foundations of a PPC marketing campaign. Of course, some of these aspects require more specialised knowledge, expertise and experience… and that’s where the need for professional PPC management services becomes apparent. If you try to DIY your campaign, you could almost safely assume that it won’t be a smart move.