There are PPC guides out there that tell you that you can make a PPC campaign in a few hours and have it running. The argument is this, that you aren’t going to get onto the first page of Google overnight, but if you launch a PPC immediately, and you have revenue coming to the door, it’s that easy.
But it’s not, and it misrepresents what successful PPC programs are. Here is the truth of it, it does take time, and we are going to explore why.
First, you have keywords. This shouldn’t be time consuming, but instead, you can look at your competitors and go from there. But, there is a difference between the first set and the right set, since finding the right one doesn’t take five minutes, but it takes a lot of time to test, negate, and refine as best as you can, and you need to look at intent, because it’s based on how you and your client interpret the keywords, and it might be very different from how your customers do.
Next, there is ad messaging, which you don’t want to rush. Good messaging encourages you to understand what not to say in your ad, but also how and who to say this. You have to understand your client, the server and product, and whom you’re trying to market to. To get this done, you need to know google ads headline, body, and extension options, and it can take a lot of testing and refining. You want to get an ad to do what you need it to do, which takes more than just a few hours.
Then there are landing pages. You typically do forget to do these if you’re trying to skimp on this, but they are critical to paid search program success. Yes, you can send people to the home or product page, but if you want to convert, you need a landing page. These take time, but usually, a good one can be made in a couple hours.
Then there is implementing conversion tracking. When you set up a google tag,m you put some code on there, and it might seem like a simple thing, but that’s a lot harder than you think. But conversion tracking is very important and requires troubleshooting, and most of the time, you need a specialist for this.
If you think you can do this in thirty minutes to an hour, you don’t know what you’re doing. The only way to avoid this is to avoid conversion tracking, which some take, but it won’t’ measure what you’re working with, or show how successful the campaign is with this.
The biggest fallacy is the idea that this can be mastered quickly, which it can’t. PPC is an art, ad it takes lots of time, effort, and trial and error. Realize this, and you’ll be able to realize over time that this is most important to master.
