In our last post we discussed how PPC account setup is like planting your farm. However, a savvy farmer knows that you need a few key elements for your seeds to start growing (“germinate” in horticultural parlance).

Getting Your Seeds To Sprout

Every good gardener knows that you need 3 things to get from a dormant seed to a growing plant: Water, Heat & Sunlight.

• Water – This is your budget. You can add keywords & write ads all day, but the clicks don’t start coming until you put in the billing info and set your budget (and PPC stops delivering when you stop watering). Every situation is unique and you may have some budgetary constraints. However, you want your budget to large enough to capture significant traffic (for valid testing and for conversions) while not breaking the bank. A good PPC manager can help you set an initial budget and advise you on opportunities as you go along.
• Heat – This is your settings. At the campaign level consider whether you want to be on the content network or search partners, what devices your ads will be on, whether you should use day-parting, and changing over to rotated ads instead of optimized. The right settings will heat things up to get your account growing much quicker.
• Sunlight – This is impressions. You’ve set the budget (watered) and heated up the soil (proper settings) but if your ads aren’t showing you won’t get results. First you’ll want to look at your bids (you just might not be bidding high enough to get on the first page), then your Quality Score (low QS can keeps your ads from showing), and don’t forget search volume. If you’re going for terms with really low volume, there just might not be many searches where you could show.