Before you start thinking about targeting your prospects or locating appropriate keywords, you need to grasp the business goals to be achieved through your a PPC campaign. Without setting up proper benchmarks to measure its success against, the exercise is of little consequence. So which are the areas you need to address?

Let me elaborate on some of the finer aspects of conceptualizing and implementing a campaign:

1. First and foremost, know the target actions users are supposed to take on the site and worth of each action to the business. In effect, decide a specific goal that your PPC campaign should fulfill. This lets you develop it in a manner useful to the business in order to produce measurable results.
2. Now comes the stage of defining your audience! This is important to work out the strategy behind your campaign. Before you develop your keyword lists, know the audience you are targeting, their geographical and social profile, the utility value of a product or service, and the mindset of your customers.
3. More granular keyword research allows you to strike a chord with potential users through target ads, optimized landing pages, and other campaign elements so that they appeal to your target audience.
4. The Google Keyword Tool helps you identify pick relevant domain-specific terms to target, keeping your audience in mind. You can use it to develop keyword lists. Putting yourself in place of your users, you may think of search terms that you would use to look for a product or service online. Group them into logical bundles or specific ad groups, with each having its own theme, topic, based on the users’ needs.
5. List down negative keywords to isolate, and also block irrelevant keywords’ combinations. A thorough list of negative key terms will reduce wasted clicks, improve clickthrough rate, and help cut campaign costs.
6. After identifying relevant lists of keywords, structure your campaign aimed at to your target audience, woven logically around these themes. Use about five-ten keywords at a time.
7. Split the keyword list up into precise ad groups, and devise the campaign structure. The number of ad groups will depend on the complexity and diversity of your business offerings and audiences for them.
8. Once a campaign structure with relevant keywords in each ad group is finalized, develop ads suited to those set of keywords as well as to the landing pages.
9. Each theme or offering should have its own USP that you need to highlight to prospects. Your copy must contain a value proposition for each ad group and target page on your site.
10. Try out different versions and formats to emphasize the user-friendly nature of your products and services within the characters of ad space permitted. To start with, pen two ads at least, for each ad group, to test different propositions, and the manner in which people react to each message so as to refine your PPC campaign.