Pay Per Click advertising is one of the most popular forms of modern advertising for brands large and small. Over the years, it has shown itself to be a very effective way to bring motivated and targeted traffic towards conversion.
PPC has the ability to put ads in front of the right audience – those that are interested in your product or service – at the right time and influence them at the moment of purchase. It’s because of these relevance and immediacy factors that PPC has become a go-to method for brands seeking an instant influx of good quality visitors. That said, PPC campaigns aren’t an easy thing to set up, run and maintain. A good PPC campaign requires a great deal of planning, hands-on work and monitoring to keep it on the right track.
When things don’t go to plan, diagnosing the reasons for the failure is often difficult. In order to run a successful PPC campaign, you’ll need a clear testing and optimisation strategy and a willingness to trawl through data and learn from analytics on a regular basis.
In this post, we’ll run through some of the more important things you’ll need to do to optimise your PPC campaigns. Let’s dive in.
High-Performance Keywords
One of the most important parts of a successful PPC campaign is finding out which keywords perform best, at the right price. You’ll then need to hone in on these to boost click-through rates and conversions without spending unnecessarily on phrases that don’t result in orders.
This requires a little digging. It means looking at the keywords you already use and matching these against your current goals. These goals could take the form of a certain percentage of conversions or other KPIs you have already established. It might even be that click-through rate and conversions are your two most important indicators.
Once you know what you’re looking for in terms of keyword performance, it’s time to assign some values to your keywords and see which ones are really pulling their weight and which are just dragging your efforts down. When you know your high-performance keywords, you can start creating ad groups around them. This will enable you to focus on your best-performing keywords and use them to drive through even greater numbers of conversions. Keep in mind that the keywords in your shortlist won’t necessarily be the ones with the most clicks. They may be the ones with a better conversion rate or a more profitable cost per conversion.
When assessing keywords, use AdWords (or your chosen platform) reporting. Highlight keywords where you’re spending money but not generating conversions and pause or delete them. This will help avoid wasting spend and ensure resources are targeted at those keywords which perform best for your business.
Bids
Bid adjustments should be part and parcel of your optimisation strategy. As an auction system, the cost you bid will need to change often in line with competitor activity. You can also experiment with different bids for different positions, keeping in mind you’ll rarely need to always be number one for a particular keyword. Experiment with different bids for different times of the day, different ad types, keyword types and positions.
Broad keyword matches are cheaper to bid on because they don’t offer the same, targeted quality of exact keywords. But this doesn’t mean you should ignore them or consider them worthless – far from it. Broad keyword matches will deliver a higher volume of clicks, but they aren’t as specific and conversion-focused as exact matches.
Compile a Negative Keywords List
Just as finding the right keywords is vital to your PPC campaign, finding and filtering out negative keywords is another very important part of the process.
Monitoring and phasing out negative keywords is not just about strengthening your approach overall, it’s also about saving time and money. It’s very easy to spend money on searches and ads that aren’t providing any benefit to your business if you don’t keep a tight eye on your negative keywords.
The best way to diagnose your negative keywords is to investigate what keywords Google searchers are using to find your ads. You will find search terms appearing that actually don’t have any relevance to your business, which means wasted time and money. Once you’ve identified your negative keywords, you need to ensure that these aren’t working against terms that could benefit your business. This means making regular reviews of negative keyword lists and matching them against your better keyword offerings.
Google Ads
Big changes to AdWords – now rebranded as ‘Google Ads’ – will have a significant impact on how marketers and businesses conduct their PPC campaigns, and it’s something you need to know about in detail.
Amid a raft of recent changes, Google Ads has added some new, powerful targeting options in the form of demographic data. For example, the new Google Ads experience enables you to use household income targeting as a parameter in the search network. This gives you invaluable insight into household income as it pertains to your search network ads – and that means you can create ads that target an audience based on its specific price point.
Overall, this means you won’t have to worry about your ads appearing in front of people who can’t afford what you’re selling. And you won’t have to create down selling ads to target specific audiences – every ad is already pointing at the right audience.
The changes to Google Ads make targeted, customised ads more potent than ever before, with a level of insight that is sure to have many marketers chomping at the big to get started.
The Final Word
Creating PPC campaigns isn’t an easy business. There’s a tremendous amount to consider, and it’s not the type of practice you can set up and leave to do its thing – your PPC campaign requires constant, up-to-date monitoring and adjustments.
Many businesses will find it easier to have an informed expert undertake the steps required for a robust, productive PPC campaign. That leaves you free to capitalise on increased purchases and conversions, which is really what the whole PPC process is about.
If you’re interested in a free lead generation for your business, take a look at L2W Digital’s Lead Generation Pilot. You could benefit from Google and Facebook ad setup, lead magnet setup, email automation and much more.
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