When you consider what type of pay-per-click (PPC) campaign you are going to do you first have to have an objective in mind. Because there are different strategies that can be employed with PPC you need to know exactly what your goals are before you ever give your first bid. There are two questions you absolutely must answer before you begin your PPC campaigns:

1. What is your budget for your campaign?

2. What time frame will be given to determine the effectiveness of the campaign?

By answering these two questions first you will be able to better know what type of PPC bidding strategy you should use.

There are three PPC bidding strategies that are often used and each can be broken down into selection of keywords, strategy for bidding, and objective of the strategy.

Here is how the three break down:

Branding or market exposure: Your ultimate goal here is implied in the name; getting as much exposure for yourself as possible. This strategy will have you going after potential customers that may not know anything about your products or services. The hope is that once you attract their attention that they will indeed be interested in what you have to offer. This strategy grabs users when they are in their research phase of the buying cycle and are getting general information on whatever it is they are eventually going to buy.

Selection of keywords: With this strategy you want to focus on a wide range of keywords in order to gain the most exposure possible for yourself. Focus on keywords that receive the most traffic, which are also referred to as the head of your list.

Strategy for Bidding: in order to properly employ this strategy you have to bid high. How high? High enough that your keywords are at the top of the list so that your business name and your ad are seen as much as possible when a basic search is conducted.

Objective of the strategy: This strategy is done to gain you some notoriety and is not meant to be anything more than a short term strategy that is developed over time into a more measurable strategy in terms of your ROI. This type of strategy is great for the initial break through into the search engine results pages (SERPs) but will prove too costly if used too long.

Conversion or ROI Strategy: This strategy focuses on getting the highest possible number of conversions or clicks throughs and will hopefully show an effective ROI for all of your keywords. To accomplish this you must take great care in selecting keywords and need to be constantly refining your keywords to ensure a high ROI.

Selection of keywords: With this strategy you will give much focus to long tail terms that will help to qualify your potential customers before they ever get to your website. This is done by targeting keywords that generate a high number of conversions.

Strategy for bidding: This requires some effort on your part. You have to figure out which keywords are giving you the most bang for your buck or the highest ROI. After you figure this out you can bid higher for the keywords that are returning more and less for those that are underperforming.

Objective of the strategy: You want to generate as many conversions or click throughs as possible with this strategy. By constantly monitoring and adjusting your keyword bidding you can accomplish your goal without too much trouble.

The sales cycle strategy: This particular strategy actually takes a little of each from the first two strategies. Here you use both broad and targeted keywords to attempt to capture users in every phase of the buying cycle.

Selection of keywords: Because you are attempting to get the users at every stage of their buying cycle, your keyword selection will of course be very broad.

Strategy for bidding: Bid lower on the more general terms that a potential customer might use when they are just beginning their search and bid higher for keywords that are going to have a high conversion rate because it is what the potential buyers will actually be looking for. This is a three tier bidding approach. For example, you will bid lower on the keyword lawnmower because it is a very general term. You would then bid a bit higher for a self-propelled lawnmower as the person conducting this search is more definite on what they want. You would then bid the highest for a keyword like John Deere self-propelled lawnmower because a person conducting this search knows exactly what they want.

Objective of the strategy: This strategy is designed so that you will have visibility to a potential customer no matter how detailed they get with their search or regardless of what stage of the buying cycle they are in.

Regardless of which strategy you choose to go with you need to be sure that you are constantly optimizing and enhancing your campaign. You can try one or all of the strategies here, just be sure that you are not wasting your time and money by not following your ultimate goals and your overall business plan.
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