To begin pay-per-click advertising, it helps to understand how a Google account is structured.

This may not be fully clear without also looking at your own PPC account in Google Adwords, so if you don’t have one yet, perhaps you should bookmark this post until you do.

This is the structure of a Google PPC account:
 

Account

  Campaign

    Ad Group

      Ads and Keywords
 

First you open your account — this is the level where you set up your billing information and other administrative actions.

Then you create a campaign — this is where you create your groups of ads and keywords, or ad groups.

(NOTE: The ad group is probably the feature you’re least familiar with — learn about it here.)

Within the ad group, you write your ads and place your keywords — learn more about ads and keywords.

If you create your own Google PPC account, it doesn’t take long before you fully understand this structure.

One of the basic components of a Google PPC campaign is the ad group.

Within the ad group, you write your ads and place your keywords — learn more about ads and keywords.

Google seems to prefer ad groups with commonly themed keywords. For example, Google would probably prefer this group of keywords:
 

orthopedic shoes
orthopedic shoes online
buy orthopedic shoes
orthopedic shoe store
orthopedic shoes website
 

to this group:
 

shoes
orthopedic shoes
running shoes
dress shoes
patent leather shoes
sneakers
 

Generally, an ad group should have two ads, and the ads should be different enough so you can do some comparison testing, known as A/B testing, and perhaps learn something about what your customers are responding to.

Here’s how to write a PPC ad.

Each pay-per-click (PPC) ad features a destination URL:

When a potential customer clicks on a PPC ad, she is taken to your website. The destination URL is the URL of the specific page that she’s taken to. This page is called the landing page.

It’s important to choose the most relevant landing page for your PPC ad, which is to say, the page that features the content that the customer is looking for. If the page doesn’t have the content she’s looking for, she only has to click her mouse to find another website.

Let’s say you sell shoes. You have a page devoted to orthopedic shoes, but you also have a home page with links to all of your pages.

If I’m looking for orthopedic shoes, and I click on your ad, I want to go immediately to a page that features orthopedic shoes. If you send me to your home page, I may click on the orthopedic-shoes link. Or I may hit the back button and try another website.

If your business’s website is not structured so that each product or service has its own dedicated landing page, you should consider restructuring it — it’s well worth the time and energy.

The text of a PPC ad should be written to get potential customers to click on the ad’s link to your site.

So when writing a PPC ad, ask yourself the question, Why should people choose my business over my competitors?

Before you start writing, you should type your basic keywords into Google (and other search engines) to find out what your competitors’s ads are focusing on.

How do you stand out from them? Are you a specialist? Do you have a price low enough to mention in the ad? Has your business won a professional award or earned a notable review from a magazine or professional organization?

(NOTE: if you do have an award or review, it should be noted on the landing page, which is the page that the user lands on when he clicks on your ad — we’ll talk about landing pages in a future post.)

Google has policies regarding creating ads — I won’t list everything here, but here’s how the company summarizes them:

Advertising should provide a positive experience to users.

Advertising should be accurate and truthful.

Advertising should comply with laws and regulations.

Advertising should be safe for all users.

Advertising shouldn’t violate users’ trust or privacy.

Advertising should be compatible with Google’s brand decisions.

If Google rejects one of your ads, it’s usually pretty clear regarding the reason. Sometimes the fix is easy — removing an exclamation point, for example — and sometimes you have to write a new ad.