The easiest way to waste money on a PPC campaign is not knowing what you’re doing or why you’re doing it. This guide explains the 10 things every converting PPC campaign has and how you can apply these to your own campaigns.

1. Goals

Setting clear goals for your account can help you evaluate performance, refocus your ad copy and fine tune your landing pages. Goals should reflect the results you’d like to see from a campaign. Before you launch your first campaign ask yourself what the goal of the campaign is:

• Are you promoting your brand?
• Driving traffic to your site?
• Collecting leads for a webinar?
• Driving product sales?

Knowing your campaign objective is the only way to benchmark ppc campaign success.

[Tweet "Knowing your campaign objective is the only way to benchmark ppc campaign success."]

2. Conversion Tracking

It’s easy enough to get clicks and impressions, but how do you know if they’re actually benefiting your business? Are they worth what you’re paying for them? Conversion tracking measures valuable information like the number of sales from form submissions. This allows you to generate granular insights and optimize your account, based on an assigned value (rather than clicks). Measuring direct actions is a better way to measure ROI that you then can apply to allocating ppc campaign budget.

3. Budget

How much money are you willing to spend on your ads, or how much has your company budgeted for PPC ads? Do you want to allocate spend to a specific effort? Will you be running it for a day, a month or is it ongoing?

Don’t set it and forget it!

Collect and analyze initial conversion rates. Using this information, you can increase budget for profitable campaigns, while reducing (or pausing) spend for poor performers. Convert your total budget into daily budgets to better distribute spend based on time AND performance. PPC managers can target the best performing days, and optimize click performance with a specific audience.

4. Audience

Who should see your ads? Who are your customers? How old are they? Where do they live? Are there any types of people you can exclude from your audience? Knowing this information helps you define your target, write effective copy and even select the best landing pages for your ads. Having a well-defined target group is essential for reducing low quality clicks, which ultimately saves you money.

5. Ad Copy

Use keywords in your ad copy for bolded text that can grab your audience’s attention. Use targeted language for your audience to make it perfectly clear you have what they’re looking for, and you can solve their problem. Remember to do a little competitive analysis and see how you can differentiate your ads from your competitors.

6. PPC Account Structure

How you structure your campaigns, ad groups, and keywords directly impacts your account performance. Should you organize your campaigns by product? By audience? By location?

[Tweet "Your #ppc campaigns, ad groups, & keyword set up directly impacts account performance."]

How you organize your campaigns will guide how you make budget decisions across different ppc campaigns. It’s important to know how to make sense of your accounts for clear KPI insights and reporting. Clear structure makes it easier to spot trends across campaigns, ad groups, ads and even keywords. This insights can reveal refined targeting, and highlight keyword expansion opportunities.

7. Keywords

Without the appropriate keywords you can’t target the best queries, which can mean throwing chunks of your budget out the window. Focus bids on the most relevant search queries for your ideal customer. Start with broad match keywords, closely monitor those initial conversions to narrow your focus and identify long-tail keyword opportunities. Remember to use consistent keywords across your ads and landing pages for relevancy and quality scores that align with your ideal customer's search intent. There’s nothing worse than clicking an ad and not seeing what you’d expected; a sure-fire way to lose a customer.

8. Negative Keywords

Make sure you are excluding keywords from your campaigns because not all keywords bring relevant traffic. Use negatives to force match type segmentation and utilize the phrase and exact match types to block irrelevant queries. Blocking ads from unrelated searches can help protect your budget from useless clicks. For example, if you only sell basketball shoes maybe try blocking words like ‘cleats’ or other types of athletic shoes. You can exclude poor quality queries found through search query reports.

9. Ad Extensions

Should you include a phone number in your ads? Are customers searching for your address to visit you in person? Extensions improve your ads by earning better ad ranks, higher CTRs and can even award you more real estate. It’s all about qualifying and better serving your audience, right? Site extensions show links to additional pages, call extensions promote your phone number and location extensions display your address. There are many options, so be sure to test all relevant extensions.

Read more on how to strengthen your offer with AdWords Extensions .

10. Ad Testing

One ad doesn’t fit all. Try different variations of copy and offerings for ads and track metric trends over time. Testing different campaign elements lets you find the best messaging. The easiest way to grow an account is to find ad copy that resonates with an audience, and actually back by higher CTRs and conversion rates. Make ads as relevant as possible for QS boots, higher positioning, and bonuses such as bolded text. This is where account structure comes into play, making it easy to fit the best ads to each ad group.Now you know! Try auditing your current campaigns and double check for these 10 things when you create your next one.