This is a guest post by Ed Leake, managing director of UK based digital marketing agency Midas Media. He has years of experience, not only growing his own agency but encouraging rapid growth of his clients’ business models too.

Paid search – known as Pay Per Click and abbreviated to PPC – can be a really potent marketing tool to convert visitors into actual event attendees.

And let’s face it, your goal is to make your event a success and that’s typically measured by attendance levels.

However it’s not a one-way street to victory with PPC. If you’re inexperienced, its benefits can be clouded by its various pitfalls such as lack of performance and excessive budget spend.

Although there are many types of PPC models to consider, I will be specifically covering Google AdWords in this article.

Make your event marketing a success by getting a handle on paid search – let’s start with the numbers:

Top level metrics

Before diving in to your new AdWords account, make sure you familiarise yourself with the numbers that matter. Let’s run through the important metrics:

Impressions and clicks tell you how many people have viewed your ads and how many click.

Quick tip: look for spikes/slumps in click volumes to identify issues and opportunities over time.

Click-through rate (CTR) a measure of how often your ads are shown versus how often your ads are clicked, the percentage of clicks to impressions.

Quick tip: use CTR to understand the relevance of your ad to the search term and your advert’s ability to attract the searchers’ attention.

Cost-per-click (CPC) is the average amount you’re paying for each click of your ad. The cost is determined by bid, competition and quality score (more on this below).

Quick tip: you can use CPC to determine and project your optimum budget.

A quick overview of quality score

Quality Score (abbreviated to QS) is the algorithm Google uses to determine the strength of your keywords in order to position your ads appropriately in its results pages. There’s a couple of different ways to view your QS.

Quick tip: unless you have the perfect 10 – your QS can always be improved. 

Having a low quality score inflates the prices you pay. So the better your score, the cheaper your clicks and the more competitive you become.

Your job is to improve the relevance of your keyword to the advert and landing page. In doing so you’ll have a much better chance of showing up in the top 4 positions.

Google have recently changed the game: ads are no longer shown on the right hand side of results on desktop search.

With thousands of advertisers bidding in the same space, it is clear why Quality Score is absolutely critical to marketing your public event through success in AdWords.

Account structure paves the way to success

One of the main causes of failure in AdWords is muddled processes and a convoluted account structure. Don’t let this happen.

The initial base for account structure is defining your purpose for advertising in the first place.

What sort of age group are you targeting for your event? What keywords are these people going to be entering into Google?

For example, if you are hosting a Digital Marketing event, your target audience may be searching for ‘digital marketing events’, ‘digital marketing forum’, ‘digital marketing expo’, etc. (more on this next).

When you first set up your account, be sure to divide it sensibly into appropriately named campaigns and ad groups.

Here’s an example of how the hierarchy works in AdWords:

This not only ensures ease of use, but also accessibility for other team members if it’s a collaborative effort. Be sure to name your containers (Campaigns and Ad Groups) logically.

Keyword research is priority

Without keyword research you might as well burn your money, so invest your time wisely at this stage and do some ground work.

Google Suggest

One of the simplest methods of discovering new keyword opportunities is to simply search for them.

Look at the autocomplete suggestions that Google brings to your attention.

Furthermore, look at the foot of the Google search page to see even more suggestions and related search terms.

Competitor events

Collate all your competitors into a list and discover what search terms they are advertising for. Also, take into account their advert’s copy so you can unearth further keyword opportunities.

Want to find out what your competitor’s are bidding on? Take a look at SEMrush which will help you identify what’s working for others.

Larger volume, lower competition

Discover terms related to your event which fall under this category. With a bit of time, these can be found using Google Keyword Planner.

The Keyword Planner also allows you to find keyword ideas by adding a landing page.

Find one of your competitor’s web pages, paste it in to the tool, refine with the category filter provided and see what comes back. You might be surprised.

Below is an example of TED Talk’s homepage in the keyword tool:

You’ll see the information above such as search volumes per month, the level of competition and the suggested bid for each keyword.

Be Different

To really carve your niche, find longer-tail keywords (terms which are perhaps 4 to 7 words long) and make sure your ads show for those searches in Google.

Long-tail search terms have two distinct advantages: less competition and more precision both of which nurture cheaper bids with a typically higher conversion rate!

Define Your Investment

The dreaded ‘B’ word – no not that one – I’m talking about budget!

Be it internal allowances, small business restrictions or stakeholder’s purse strings – before you start, it is key to align spend with your financial situation.

Consider the financial gains to be had before pulling the trigger and spending money on AdWords (or for that matter, any form of advertising).

• What does it cost to buy a ticket?
• Are you looking for immediate profit or break-even?
• How much profit is there as a result?

These questions will help you identify your affordability, or in the world of paid search, your Cost per Acquisition (CPA).

Understand your true cost

Your CPA will dictate the budget applied to a campaign. It will also help you set your maximum bid for your Ad Groups and even enable you to tweak the performance of an individual keyword.

Hypothetically looking ahead, what happens if my cost per conversion is too high?

Sailing past your target CPA can hurt, so you need to be correcting inefficiencies such as:

• Poor keyword choices
• Incorrect use of keyword match types
• A lack of negative keywords
• Poor AdWords quality score
• Keyword to Ad copy mismatch
• Low bids
• Bids that are too high

And more…

But wait, what if profit isn’t the goal?

Not all events need to run a profit on their first time round, you may have ulterior motives.

That said, without clear goals you cannot measure success.

Are you looking to gain email subscribers to nurture? Or are you looking for direct conversions on a landing page which result in payment? Perhaps social shares and engagement are your thing?

Whatever the case may be, you must have robust tracking in place. With the power of Google Analytics at your fingertips for free, there’s no excuse to not install and setup conversion tracking.

Once done, you can import those goals in to AdWords and where appropriate, assign a value and category.

All done?

So you’ve understood the metrics, you’ve planned out your campaign structure and conducted keyword research for each area of your campaign. Then you’ve written ads to tie everything together, but wait… where will you be sending this traffic?

Homepage out, landing pages in!

Let me start by saying, never send visitors to your homepage!

In all but the rarest of cases is your homepage the right or most relevant page to land on from your ad and its search term. Homepage traffic from ads is both lazy and expensive (i.e. you’ll eat through budget).

The whole process of clicking a targeted ad and ending up on the homepage is completely detached from a good user experience.

Improve conversions

A few steps to follow when designing a conversion-focused landing page:

1. Continuity – keep the message in line with the search term and advert
2. Head and sub heading – keep the message concise, clear and explanatory
3. Remove distractions such as menus and other calls to action
4. Describe your offer, value and any unique selling points
5. Support with trust signals, such as reviews
6. Give a clear call to action – what do you want visitors to do?
7. Make it elegant, make it fast and above all else retain continuity

Think mobile devices

For each of your campaigns, you should show ads that are optimised for mobile and desktop.

Mobile search has now surpassed desktop searches on Google so it is critical you have a mobile friendly website.

The AdWords platform allows you to optimise your bids accordingly and create mobile-friendly ads; or, for a more granular approach, consider separate Ad Groups for mobile only.

Over time, keep a close eye on mobile vs desktop performance and optimise to suit.

Again, you will need your conversion tracking set up to do this accurately and with purpose.

Call only campaigns

If you’re taking bookings or enquiries over the phone, try click-to-call ads.

With click-to-call ads a user doesn’t even have to visit your website, instead a phone call is triggered direct from their ad click. This simple tactic can work wonders.

It’s important to consider your audience – if you are targeting millennials, chances are they will be highly biased to mobile use and therefore your strategy could be more effective via mobile.

Don’t Neglect testing

Consider this – your assumptions are probably wrong.

When it comes to most of life’s expeditions, including online ads, making assumptions about the road ahead can be dangerous. So whenever you launch an AdWords campaign, bear in mind it is an iterative process.

Nothing is going to be perfect first time round.

Or the second!

Test everything; test keywords, their synonyms and related terms. Test two versions of an advert in each Ad Group, test landing pages and copy. Literally test everything you can.

Quick tip: Google’s default setting has one priority: to spend your money by attracting the most clicks. Your priority is likely to be more conversions and ROI.

Therefore when testing ads, the optimal setting is to “rotate indefinitely”, even if AdWords does warn you otherwise!

And that’s just the start

I hope the above has given you a taster in getting your first AdWords campaign off the ground. If you’re new to the Pay Per Click scene it will be daunting, it might even scare you off entirely.

I’ll leave you with two key tips:

1. Start slowly, focus on your most important conversion/result first and expand only once you’re finding success
2. Make sure your keyword, ad and landing page are highly relevant to one another

PPC can be daunting but don’t fear – start small, build on success and if you have any specific questions please leave a comment below and I’ll offer help!