Need help with a mock PPC campaign

Hi Codith,

Perhaps I can help you?

I have 27 years experience in marketing, and have operated an AdWords agency for 14 years. Over the years I have developed and executed successful marketing plans for many types of businesses, including dentistry and micro-niche marketing which is what you are attempting.

Over the years I have developed a Market Planning & Analysis process that includes:

• Keyword Research & Analysis
• Value Proposition Research & Analysis
• Competition Research & Analysis
• And other proprietary techniques

That process allows me to craft a strategy, based on our clients goals, that takes into account Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT). While it might sound like overkill for a small client or, as in your case, a small test, it is standard practice at our agency for all accounts, regardless of size. I have staff that are trained in the process, and we have documented the process and honed the training process as well to ensure consistent results.

I'm happy to share some general concepts on how we approach ad writing that you might find helpful.

1. Be specific.
People typically do not respond, or take action, when presented with messages that are vague or general in nature.

2. Find and test specific selling points that are relevant and valuable to your target audience.
One of the ways you can test selling points is to write multiple ads for each ad group and emphasize just one unique selling point in each ad within the group. After a short test period you will have CTR data that may help you find the best value propositions for your target audience.

Of course make sure that you are always practicing the basics that you will find in this video:


And for the benefit of everyone that may read this post, you also need to select and oganize keywords properly within your account to get your ads to perform well. This video will explain the basics:


Now, obviously you are struggling with the challenge of generating sufficient traffic that is also well targeted for your micro-niche. Since there will be very little search volume for the keywords that are highly specific to your niche, targeting the bottom of the marketing funnel (the smallest segment of the funnel) exclusively will likely lead to little or no new business for your client.

In a case like this you must go broader in your targeting to generate sufficient traffic to merit the effort and cost of managing a campaign. So that begs the question: "what is the most cost-effective way to go broad?" The method that is most effective can vary for each niche.

In your particular niche it might be too expensive to target more general dentistry related search terms to get relevant traffic for your highly specific micro niche. There are other ways that might be more cost-effective. You might consider using Display ads, bringing in targeted traffic at a much lower CPC than might be possible on the Search Network. Also consider Video ads as the cost per view can also be very low.

The bottom line is that is generally more cost effective to target the bottom of the funnel, but you are always targeting the smallest segment of the funnel, and in a micro-niche it may simply be too small to be practical. If you need to go broad, make sure that you are using the most-cost effective channels for the top of the marketing funnel, and often that will not be the search network. Be sure to create separate campaigns for top, middle, and bottom funnel segments, and test different marketing channels to see which can contribute the most cost-effective traffic for each section of the marketing funnel.

Since you are managing a mock campaign as a challenge, your client might not be willing to consider that a new campaign is managed in phases. The initial phase is all about data gathering and is not indicative of the actual long term performance that can be achieved from the phases that follow. If that's the case then your performance is going to be evaluated based not only on how well you manage a campaign, but also on how well you research and how close your initial guesses are during the data gathering phase.

If can convince your client to evaluate your results based on the optimization phase, rather than the initial data gathering phase, you stand a better chance of making a positive impression. Otherwise, it's a challenge to see how good your initial guesses are, and not how well you manage a campaign.