Launching a campaign is easy. However, just because you do it, doesn’t mean it works. You need a strategy. Platforms such as Google Ads and Facebook have made it so that anyone can use them. An Ads account can be created in a few clicks and launched by following their step by step process. This process, incidentally, includes entering your billing details. Before you know it you’re paying for clicks to your website.

Facebook makes it even easier by prompting you to turn your Facebook posts into ads. This is a great example of what a very important part of the strategy “Boost this Post” or the CTA or call to action is.

By following these steps, you will successfully launch a campaign, however, your campaign may or may not be successful. You will spend money on clicks, but most likely you will not earn more from those clicks than they cost you. 

You need a strategy behind the way you use the tools, messages, and images the PPC platform provides. All of this serves to have your ads seen by qualified internet users, users that have, or could have the intent to buy. You need a well-planned strategy behind both the ads themselves and the steps the users take on your website in order to convert. 

The bottom line is that you need to have a strategy on how you reach a portion of those billion users on the internet and lead them on a journey from point “a” to point “b”, from the click to the sale. 

Most users embarking on this journey, by clicking, on your ads will not finish it. You need to establish milestones along the way to help optimize your traffic as well as to optimize the path you take users on to becoming your paying customers. For that, you need a strategy behind how you track and measure the progress of users along the journey. 

Before we dive into actual PPC advertising, showing your ads and getting users to begin their journey, you need to plan the route they take to its end, to the sale. Think of it like really good Google Maps directions. If not, they could get lost along the way and go from being a potential sale to one of those billion internet users out there that will never buy your product or service.