PPC Beginner

[Joshua Sloan]

Hi,

Can anyone give me some tips, I'm planning to start doing PPC on Yahoo! with a starting budget of $300. I think I've picked up that much from reading other posts.

I live/work in San Diego, but I was thinking I should focus on one or two communities in the area, ie. Rancho Bernardo, Escondido...rather than the county as a whole.

Is my thinking above, correct?

What other advice can you give me?

Hopefully I can go into this knowing a little bit so I don't just throw away thousands of dollars on an approach that isn't successful. Your help is much appreciated.

Thanks.

[Tyson]

One idea might be to create a specific landing page for those two communities to send your PPC traffic instead of just shooting them straight to the home page? Also...do you have analytics to test and refine your PPC attempts? You'll definitely need it.

[Auliya]

Hey Joshua!

I just started learning and doing some PPC campaigns in the last few weeks, i may be able to give you a few tips.

First and foremost, i must say do your keyword research. Dont just think up a keyword you like and aim for it because you may be surprised how little it is searched or how expensive the placement is. Go through your county pages and find all the keywords you can using keywords tools (like yahoo's http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch/ keyword selector tool http://inventory.overture.com/d/sear...ory/suggestion). THen once you have all the different keywords you can think of find out what their PPC bids are worth (yahoo again: http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/search/tools/bidtool/ ). You want to aim for keywords that are searched more but cost less. Always aim for a 1-3 placement, and try to go for keywords $1.50 or less, that way your add will be seen more for less cost. Dont put your whole $300 into one campaign, why not try to promote as many county pages of yours as you can?

Im not sure how yahoo PPC is different from google PPC, i havent yet used Yahoo PPC, but i think keyword research is the key to PPC. From my experience in it, you'd be amazed at certain keywords that are searched a lot that no one bids for, and if you do your research well you can utilize this to your advantage.

[Eric Blackwell]

If you use Auliya's advice and find as many low cost kws to start out with as you can, you'll be fine...


Eric