A Simple Guide to Doing Pay Per Click (For Beginners)

A large majority of my success in online marketing has come from doing pay per click and I’d like to guide you through the same methods I use to…

• Attain high click through’s.
• Very high quality scores.
• And an overall low cost per click.

Whether you’re a complete beginner to PPC or not, I would strongly recommend you read this. It may just save you tons of time, money and increase your profits.

I’ve been doing online marketing for over 8 years, 5 of which were spent focusing mainly on pay per click and that was because I was experiencing major success in that field (Here’s my best example: A 1 page website that earned $100k).

And even in projects which did not yield me much or any success, I still managed to lose very little and experienced very high #’s, most people who do PPC could only dream off. And I’m going to show you how to mirror this success in your own projects.

It’s amazing to me how many people just don’t understand how to do pay per click properly. I’d venture to say over 90% of all people who try this do not do well. If you:

• Have an online business you want to advertise.
• Have a site you want to promote for personal or affiliate reasons.
• Are currently trying PPC but not seeing good results.
• Never did PPC before and want to try it.
• Are a complete beginner/veteran to PPC.

Then this guide is for you. To show you exactly how I do things, I’ll be explaining important things you need to know about pay per click, then showing you a specific campaign (one of my most successful) I made which yielded incredible #’s and profits. You will then take this as a reference for your own campaigns. 

Pay Per Click (PPC) basics (What you need to know):

PPC is the form of promoting your website/someone else’s website through ads being places on search engines, like Google and Bing. It is not the same as organic traffic (here is the difference between organic and paid search).

The beauty of PPC is that you can pay very little, appear very high on popular search terms being sought after by people and receive tons of visitors, very quickly and potentially profit A LOT.

Note: This guide will show you how to set up a good quality PPC campaign through Bing. But the same approach also works for Google Adwords and vice versa. 

One more important note: Bing ads now runs on both Bing & Yahoo’s search engines, which amount to about 30% of all search traffic.

Usually the way PPC works is that when someone clicks on you ad, you will be charged the price you set. The price you set is called the CPC (cost per click). Usually the amount you pay will NOT go over your set price. 

Very important/common pay per click terms:

Ads:

This is what will appear on search engines. You have a limited space to create a eye catching ad to attract visitors and I’ll show you exactly how to capitalize on this.

Keywords: 

When creating an ad, you will be asked for which keyword/s you will want your ad to appear under. Keywords are simply words/phrases people type into search engines to find something. Full keyword tutorial.

There is NO limit to how many keywords you can advertise under. But you should organize them to have better performing ads. I’ll show you how below. 

Adgroup:

It’s just a group of keywords. You can have as many adgroups as you want and it’s always best to have a number of adgroups, with each group having the same type of keywords.

Geographic targeting:

The area/s where you want your ad to display. If you have a local business, make sure you’re only displaying your ad within your area! So many people get this wrong, it’s not even funny. If I live in New York City and I’m advertising a business I own there, I’d only want my ad to show there. If I was promoting some sort of product that’s known through several countries, I’d only display the ad in those countries. 

Ad extensions:

This is only recommended for physical businesses. Ad extensions allow you to add additional things to your ad such as a telephone number, physical location (so it can be displayed on maps), and other benefits. I usually recommend just using the phone number and address. You’re only allowed to use 2 extensions per ad.

Quality Score: 

A measurement of how good your website is in regards to your ad. It’s only a 1-10 scale with 10 being the best. Most people usually get less than 5 because they aren’t being relevant. 

Your website needs to contain great information in order to have a higher quality score. And your ad needs to specifically say target keywords which are ON your website. This will keep quality score high.

Ex: If my ad targets keyword A, and goes to a website talking about keyword B, this will lead to a low quality score.

If my ad targets keyword A, contains keywords related to keyword A, links to a site talking about keyword A, the quality score will be higher. More tips on improving your quality score here.

Impressions:

The number of times your ad shows up on a search engine. If I have 100 impressions listed, it means my ad popped up 100 times. That’s all this means.

Clicks: 

The number of times your ad got clicked on. 

CTR (Click through rating):

It’s the number of impressions divided by the clicks. Let’s say I had 100 impressions and 20 clicks. My CTR would be 20%. The higher your CTR, the less you’ll pay. Also it will increase your quality score.

Most people can’t even get to 1% and that’s considered OK. I’ve seen advertisers with a CTR of 0.02 before. I’ll show you how to get a much higher CTR either way.

Exact, phrase, broad keywords:

You can make your keyword show up 3 different ways. If I was targeting a keyword like “Diets for women”, here is how it would work with these 3 different ways:

Exact: Anyone who types the EXACT words diets for women will see my ad.

Phrase: Anyone who types things variations of “diets for women” will see my ad. So “best diets for women” will make my ad show up. Or “women diets for 40 year olds” will also see it. 

Broad: Anyone who types, diets, for, women will see my ad. I recommend keeping broad off. This is because most people who see your ad under broad will likely not be interested and won’t click on it, which will increase impressions and lower your CTR (Not good!).

There’s also a 4th option called “negative keywords” which is basically like taboo. You can select which keywords you don’t want to trigger your ads, but for this guide, you don’t have to worry about this.

Content/Display Network: 

Shows your ads on places which host Bing/Google Adsense ads. Most of the time your ad will show in places which aren’t related to your market. This will increase impressions but likely not get many clicks. I recommend you always keep this OFF. 

There are a number of ways to monetize on the content/display networks, but the standard approach to PPC is not recommended. I’ll be discussing that in a later post.

Ok phew, we got that out of the way! I know it can be annoying especially if you’re new to PPC, but now we get to the good part! The actual ad making. I’ve written all of these things above so when I show you how to create good ads, I’ll be adding in many of the terms you just read. 

How to create a successful pay per click ad:

I will re-creating a successful PPC ad and showing step-by-step what to do. This will be over Bing Ads, but you can apply the exact same principals to Google Ads and other places. From that point, whenever you make your own ads, use this as reference and you’ll see results.

Note 1: There’s both pros/cons to using either Bing Ads or Google Ads. I recommend starting with Bing Ads and then moving onto Google’s network.

Note 2: Having a great performing ad does not always = success. Your website is more important than your ad, meaning if you have a great performing ad, but the website isn’t doing as well as you’d hoped, fix your website up. 

Here is a screenshot of my most successful ads I’ve had. The one we’ll be looking at is circled. It has a good CTR, great # of clicks and EXCELLENT conversion: The case study. on this particular project.

Couple of things to note before we get into it: 

• The campaign we’ll be looking at is the one I circled (17day).
• I’ve put rectangles around the most important things to note. 
• The CTR in most of these campaigns is over 1%. Anything over 1% is good. 
• Some campaigns, especially the 17day one have had A LOT of money invested into them, but they made a huge profit. 
• Remember not every PPC campaign that performs well in ads will sell well. Your website must also be optimized! 

Let’s Begin!

When I create PPC ads, I’ll typically follow these 6 steps:

1) Find a product/service to make a PPC campaign on.

In my case, I found that a diet program called the 17 day diet was very popular and I wanted to promote it. If you’re promoting your own business, you already have this covered. 

2) Find out where people are looking for this product/service.

In my case, people in the US & Canada were searching for it, so when I selected the geographic locations I wanted my ad to show in, I chose the US & Canada. If you were promoting a business, you can narrow it down to Country, State, Province, City, ect…

Be as specific as possible here. We don’t want our ads showing in places where people don’t know about the product/service! This leads to more impressions & less CTR. We always want a higher CTR.

3) Set up a website talking about the product/service.

I created a website that reviews the 17 day diet. It thoroughly talked about it (good diet by the way), promoted it and recommended another diet just in case people were looking for alternatives. 

If you don’t have a website, you can try my personal approach to building websites. It costs nothing to try it.

And if you already have your website set up, this part is done (though you may need to go back in the future and change/improve things).

3) Find keywords people will look for when searching for product/service.

This is VERY important. Though you can find 100’s of keywords people can type to find out, I strongly recommend starting with keywords that are closely related to your website’s subject. In my case, these were the keywords:

• 17 day diet
• 17 day diet plan
• Seventeen day diet
• Dr. Moreno diet
• 17 days diet
• 17 day diet review
• Is the 17 day diet good
• Dr. Moreno diet plan
• Mike Moreno diet

In your case, think about what people may type to find what it is you’re advertising. If you were advertising say a barber shop in NYC, you could use keywords like:

• Barber shop NYC
• Best barber shop NYC
• Barber shop NYC (zip code)
• Cheap barber shop NYC
• Hair cut store NYC
• Where to get a hair cut in NYC

Notice in each keyword, I’m being VERY specific. I’m never going to advertise under keywords like these:

• How to cut hair
• How to become a barber

These keywords are NOT related to the business I’m promoting. These would be people interested in cutting their own hair or learning how to do it. When finding keywords, you need a targeted audience so you get targeted traffic! This will help make sure people who click on your site are people who are truly interested in your service. Meaning you pay less and attract more potential clients/customers.

5) Organize/properly set up adgroups.

This is also VERY important. Once you have your keywords set up, you will need to organize them into different adgroups. Most people tend to take 100’s of keywords, write 1 ad and hope it’ll work. This is WRONG. 

Take your keywords are organize them based on a technique called the “common keyword technique”. This means you will gruop together keywords which have 2 or more words related. Here is how it works out for me (I bolded the keywords in color which have common words/numbers):

Adgroup #1:

• 17 day diet
• 17 day diet plan
• 17 days diet
• 17 day diet review
• Is the 17 day diet good

Adgroup #2:

• Seventeen day diet
• Seventeen day diet review

Adgroup #3:

• Dr. Moreno diet
• Dr. Moreno diet plan
• Mike Moreno diet

Notice in each instance 2 or more keywords are similar. Make sure you do this with your ads as well. The reason being is this:

• When we write ads, we’ll write a separate one for EACH adgroup. 
• This will allow us the ability to enter more of the keywords into the ad.
• This will make more words appear BOLD when someone sees them. 
• Bolder words are easier to see and more likely to get clicked on.
• This means higher/CTR and lower CPC (cost per click).

6) Write the ad correctly.

First the video version:

Now here’s the video broken down into step-by-step instructions. I will provide screenshots to illustrate how to do this properly.

Step 1:

Register with Google Adwords & Bing ads (If you make a Bing webmaster tools account, they will give you a $50 credit!)

Step 2:

Head into your Bing ads account and click on “Create Campaign”. Set it up the way I did it here (with your specifics). This is how it’ll look:

Note: When setting up with Adwords, the process looks different but works pretty much the same exact way.

Step 3:

Making your ad! This is VERY important. For this we will need to take 1 adgroup we set up the keywords which have 2-3 words in common and writing an ad for them. For this ad, I started with these keywords (which are already organized):

• 17 day diet
• 17 day diet plan
• 17 days diet
• 17 day diet review
• Is the 17 day diet good

Now we’ll write the ad for this. Notice how many times the word “17 day diet” appears!

With the way this ad is set up now, whenever someone types for example “17 day diet”, here is how my ad will appear:

17 Day Diet Exposed

Best Review of 17 Day Diet.

Discover Everything About This Diet.

17DayDietDrMoreno.com

That’s 4 areas where the ad shows up bold! If you do a search for the 17 day diet, you’ll be lucky to find ads which have that many instances of being bold. Remember the more bold words we have, the more odds we’ll be seen and clicked on!

Also make sure your ad makes sense! Google & Bing do NOT like it when your ad is trying to spam, bold everything or doesn’t make sense. Make sure the grammar is there, while also keeping the main common keywords in the text!

Step 3: 

Keyword time! Prepare that list of keywords from the adgroup we used above. When you enter them, click “add” and they will go over to the right window. Make sure each place next to the keyword which says “broad” is changed to show on “Phrase” & “Exact”. I do not recommend using broad. Here is how it’ll look:

After this is done, click SAVE.

Step 4: Last part!

Now comes the area where we set how much we’re willing to bid. Also I always recommend turning OFF the content network to avoid your ad showing in places where it’s unlikely to get targeted traffic. This will show your ad in less places, but at least the people who DO click on your ad will be a specific audience, meaning higher CTR, lower CPC & better performance overall!

Then click SAVE, and you’re done!

If you had more adgroups, you would simply go back to the same campaign, click on “Add adgroup”, then follow the same steps, but apply it towards the new adgroup.

For example:

I had 3 adgroups in this project. The instructions above showed how I set up my first one. I would then set up my second one in the same order.

My second adgroup contained these keywords:

• Seventeen day diet
• seventeen day diet review

My ad looks like this:

Seventeen Day Diet Plan

Best Review Seventeen Day Diet.

Does This Plan Really Work.

17DayDietDrMoreno.com

Everything else stays the same. Repeat this process for all your adgroups. It can be annoying and long. But this WILL greatly help your CTR and ad performance!

Putting it altogether:

PPC is a potentially VERY profitable way to promote your online business (if you have one) or someone else’s. Most people do NOT utilize the same things I mentioned above and it’s the reason why their ads do not perform as good as they can.

Pay per click can either be VERY rewarding, break even or a complete disaster and most people fall into the last 2 categories. Utilize these tips and your ad will perform very well. I personally use these rules and my ads usually perform VERY well. As I mentioned before, you also need to make sure your website is optimized.

My best advice if you’re serious about doing PPC is to:

1. Utilize this tutorial. Don’t forget about the $50 adcredit you get if you sign up with Bing ads.

Google adwords also has a promotion for newcomers.

Remember the same approach I showed you here works for Google adwords too.

2. If you’re serious about starting an online business, I would strongly recommend checking out my #1 recommendation which shows you the best ways to do this. They teach people how to create and run online businesses through many methods, including PPC. It’s a personal recommendation, but completely up to you.

I follow these rules to the letter:

Want to read a case study where I put these rules to use? Check out an updated Bing Ads pay per click guide here. You’ll see how much money I saved, made and how many clicks I received from using this exact strategy. I originally wrote this guide many years ago and this one I linked to is from 2020.

Did this pay per click guide help you?

I’d like to hear your thoughts on this tutorial and if it helped you make your first PPC campaign. If you already had one and used this tutorial, did you see an improvement in CTR? If you have any question/s, feel free to leave them below! I will be more than happy to answer it 🙂