Launching a effective pay-per-click (PPC) campaign is one of the most popular digital marketing tactics today. It provides ease of entry, quick returns, and reliable results. According to Hubspot, 68% of marketers stated that paid advertising is “very important” or “extremely important” to their overall marketing strategy.
Companies can use this approach to get instant results through advertisement and use PPC to improve visibility on search engines.
However, the success of a PPC campaign depends on how meticulous and insightful you are. It’s important to consider all the factors involved and work on every aspect of your campaign while being ready to monitor your results, test different methods, and adjust the approaches.
Here is what you need to know to make your campaign a success.
Set the goals for your effective PPC campaign
You can use PPC campaigns for various reasons. This includes sales, lead generation, sign-ups, increased traffic, brand exposure, effective on-page conversions, and so on. Many people think that PPC only focuses on profits, but this is not the case.
Before you start tailoring your campaign, it’s essential to recognize the objectives of your business and how you can use an effective PPC campaign to reach them. For example, you might want to increase brand awareness, get more people to look at your content, or drive more website visitors.
Depending on the goal of your campaign, you will have to adjust your approach. For example:
- If you’re looking to increase traffic, it’s generally a good idea to track user paths and use broader keywords to get more people to visit your site.
- Using ads can help boost brand awareness, especially when using display ads.
- For increasing sales, an effective PPC campaign gives the advantage of targeting people who have already expressed interest in your products or services.
Do your keyword research
Keyword research is the pillar of your effective PPC campaign. KWs can help you make the most of each ad, find relevant ad groups, create descriptions for your ads, and so much more. Take the time to do keyword research properly.
Use this data to improve your SEO strategy as well. Also, you will see which headlines or long-tail keywords have the best conversion rates and ROI. These are the keywords you want to use to level up your on-page SEO as well.
Analyze landing pages
It’s possible to use the KWs you already have on your landing pages or use these pages as inspiration for your KWs. So your first step should be to analyze your landing page and see which KWs it already ranks for.
Once you’ve done that, you can see how well those KWs perform and analyze their relevance for your customers. The KWs on your landing page should be relevant to the services/products you offer.
Determine your industry/niche
One of the most critical steps that will determine the rest of your campaign. It’s crucial because you will know how to talk to your target audience and the best way to present your brand, products, or services.
On the other hand, it’s crucial because you can use the right keywords. Write down all the assets you want to promote with your ads and transform them into keywords. In the end, use a keyword research tool to figure out which keywords your competitors are using.
Create a seed keyword list
The seed keyword list is the initial group of keywords you can use. Use a target model for your research to sort the keywords based on interest and popularity. Your target model should have six different groups of keywords, including:
- Terms about products/services
- Terms related to your brand
- Competitor terms
- Substitute terms for products/services
- Phrases that could further explain products/services
- Terms related to your audience
Use KW research tools
Keyword research tools let you learn what your audience is searching for on the web, give additional insights, help you discover trends, and make it easier to manage keywords.
The three essential characteristics of your keywords are:
- Search volume
- Authority
- Keyword relevance
Targeting audiences
Your keywords should be directly related to the search queries your target audience is using. There are three types of search queries:
Navigational
Search queries used to find a specific page or site. That means using branded keywords for your business and using navigational keywords of your competitors to get your ads displayed when people search for their business.
Informational
These are general search queries that can involve many different results. The best way to target these keywords is using quality content that gives a lot of helpful information on a whole topic and is preferably divided into smaller relevant pieces that people might be looking for. Forums are an excellent source option for this kind of keyword!
Transactional
Search queries that show the intent of buying something and can include product or brand names along with terms like “buy,” “sale,” and so on. Ads focusing on these queries have high clickability in PPC, and they should be targeted often.
Optimize your website
Your landing pages need to be unique and offer the best possible experience to get results from your campaign. You can create the best ad in the world, but your landing page needs to take it from there and “seal the deal.”
First of all, your landing page and ads need to be aligned. One of the biggest causes of high bounce rates is that the page isn’t relevant to the ad the person has clicked on. The messaging on your landing page should match the one in the ad.
Adjust your headlines and use headlines that are the same as in the ad. The copy should further engage people. At the same time, you need to work on social proof, create trust signals, add form fields, create striking imagery, optimize the call to action buttons, create an intuitive layout, etc.
Creating ads
When creating your PPC ads, always think about the audience’s needs and what will make them click on your ads. Revise your keyword bidding regularly and look to expand your ad group overtime to boost your results.
Optimize text
The three components of text ads include headlines, description fields, and display URLs. Your copy needs to be compelling and genuine, and all the elements of the ad should consist of keywords. In the end, some form of CTA should be located within the text.
The heading is the first thing people will see, and it needs to have your unique selling proposition or the solution to a specific problem while being memorable and trustworthy. Examples have proven that adding numbers to the headline can increase your CTR by 217%.
If you target multiple locations, create different ads and make the headings relevant for the specific location. You can use the headlines and descriptions of your competitors to get inspiration and consider adding countdown timers to your ads.
Choose the right landing pages
The ad’s performance is directly connected to the landing pages they promote. Choose the pages you’ve optimized but make the right decision. It’s generally a good idea to use a single ad per page and optimize them both for the best effects.
In other words, you should optimize each page to help you achieve the goals of your PPC ad. If you’re looking to get more leads, you should be driving visitors to a page where they can provide personal information or submit a form.
Set your keywords
You can use four types of keywords in PPC: negative keywords, broad keywords, phrase match, and exact match keywords. Negative keywords are the keywords you don’t want your ads to appear – the opposite of specific keywords.
For example, if you don’t offer services that your competitors do, but searches use those keywords and some other KWs relevant to your brand, you might want to exclude them.
Broad KWs are most common, and they have a comprehensive approach. When you add these keywords, your ad will be displayed to searches relevant to these keywords, exact matches, variations, misspellings, etc.
Phrase match keywords are phrases that you want to be found in searches regardless of whether they have any other words along with them. On the other hand, exact match KWs will display ads only to the same searches that you’ve added as your keywords.
Ongoing optimization
Fine-tuning your campaign is essential, as well as tracking all the day-to-day results. Here are some things you should optimize during your campaign.
Keyword bids
Bidding is like an auction for your KWs. For each KW, Google gives the quality score and price. It’s a balancing job between the value of the KWs and how effective they are. You can also set up bidding to be run automatically in Google ads.
CTR
CTR is one of the most influential PPC metrics, regardless of your campaign goals. After all, you want people to click as many times as possible on your ad. You can always fine-tune your KWs, increase bids, adjust headlines, test ads, use extensions, optimize CTAs, and many other things to improve this metric.
Landing page CR
Similar to monitoring and optimizing your ads, it’s essential to do this for your landing page. First of all, track the CR on your dedicated landing page. Then test out different layouts, CTAs, descriptions, and critical proposals to get better results.
The bottom line on an effective PPC campaign
PPC can be very effective, and it has a lot more uses than it seems at first look. The more you do it and get experienced at it, the better you will fine-tune campaigns. Take the time to put in the effort and be prepared to spend some money until you’ve learned to make the most of it.
The guest blog was written by Matija Konjic, a marketing and tech enthusiast. He likes to get scientific about marketing, performing research on various related topics. He likes to share his insights and interpretations with like-minded enthusiasts. Connect with him on Facebook.