The Blueprint of One of my most successful PPC Campaigns

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Ok, now I'm going to give away the blueprint of one of my killer ppc campaigns from a bit ago..

The offer was entertainment books (Start Saving with Exclusive Coupons, Offers and Discounts | Entertainment.com), at the time the restrictions on the offer was you couldn't bid on "entertainment book"

At the time I really liked the merchants page for the offer, so I didn't even bother with a landing page, it had all the selling points I wanted and needed.

I decided to start with Google Adwords (this was back in the day when you could direct link and have simple landing pages, etc) If I was to start this again these days I would need to find another way like Bing, 7search, Miva, etc.

I targeted by country, I do not recall where the offer was available for, but I know it was available for Canada and USA for sure, so I targeted Canada (as most people were targeting the USA). This was a search only campaign, not using the content network at all.

So for keywords, I know that I could not use "entertainment book", so I had to think out of the box, one idea I came up with was just to bid on entertainment, then see what results I get, from there then add negative keywords to weed out the keywords combinations that I did not want. After talking to my AM, we both agreed that it was a little bit of a grey area and best to stay away from (however I was told if I wanted to, I could do this but it would be at my own risk), it also might not have been as targeted as I would have wanted, but still it seemed like a good idea

What I ended up doing was taking another route for keywords, i started thinking to myself, why do people want entertainment books? who would benefit from entertainment books? etc.. (if anyone isn't firmilar with what these are, check out the website, it is just a hard copy book full of coupons and offers, these books have been around a long time, much longer than groupon or any of those deal websites), so where do we go, people that would benefit from this product are often either looking for a coupon, deal or discount. I decided to go the coupon route.

So now we've decided we're going to do the coupon route, so I decided to think of some combinations that people would search for to find coupons. From here I decided to pursue the restautant route to start. I did some searches to come up with some restaurant chains across canada, here's some samples (Mcdonalds, wendys, A&W, harveys, montanas, kelseys, swiss chalet, the keg, tim hortons, pickle barrel, baton rouge, crabby joes, moxies, mr greek, mandarin, shoeless joes, smittys, east side marios, earls), that's just the start, but you hopefully get the idea.

So now we have our restaurants (part of our keywords), what to do next, let's come up with some real keywords that we can use for our campaign. I decided to come up with some idea's on how people would do searches for restaurant coupons and here's an example of what I came up with:
coupons for {restaurant}
coupon for {restaurant}
{restaurant} coupons
{restaurant} coupon
coupon {restaurant}
coupons {restaurant}

Now this was just the start, but hopefully it gives you some inspiration on how to do it.. from here I needed to finish the keyword combinations and put them into adgroups. For adgroups I decided to make each restaurant chain it's own adgroup, see below for examples:

For Mcdonalds, I called the adgroup - adgroup - mcdonalds
and here's the keywords i put in to that adgroup:
coupons for mcdonalds
coupon for mcdonalds
mcdonalds coupons
mcdonalds coupon
coupon mcdonalds
coupons mcdonalds
coupons for mcdonald's
coupon for mcdonald's
mcdonald's coupons
mcdonald's coupon
coupon mcdonald's
coupons mcdonald's
coupons for mcdonald
coupon for mcdonald
mcdonald coupons
mcdonald coupon
coupon mcdonald
coupons mcdonald


I did this for all the restaurants above, I am only going to show the mcdonalds sample, but you can probably image the process as it will be the same for every other restaurant as well.
I tried to get as many matching posibilities, I always use exact keywords when using this type of strategy. You'll also notice there aren't many keywords per adgroup, this makes it so I can write an ad more specific to those keywords, for the mcdonalds example above, I can write ad's specific to mcdonalds and it will appeal and interest the people more than a generic ad. You will also see with above, there is also a lot more room to ad more or make modifications which is also great, we always want to be able to expand and scale.

So now let's move onto the ads, so for the mcdonalds ad group, we need to think of our ads, what I did is I tried to find combo's and meals specfic to mcdonalds to come up with ads for, and here are some idea's on what I ended up with.

2 for 1 Big Mac
Get Several Coupons for
2 for 1 Offers for Mcdonalds

McDonalds 2 for 1
Get Coupons for
McDonalds and Save $

McDeals at McD's
Get Several Coupons
& Discounts today!


It's just a start and to give everyone an idea, as you can see they are tailored specifically for the specific restaurant, we want to get them as specific as possible to what the searcher searched for.

From here I just did the same for each restaurant and then once the campaigns went live, I watched the CTR for each ad, removed losers and adding more ads to find the best.

This isn't by any means a full case study, but hopefully it shows how to think and arrange a PPC Campaign.
#blueprint #campaigns #ppc #successful

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