Tips for a successful Pay-Per-Click campaign
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is one of the most effective forms of digital marketing when it comes to paid ads. PPC can drive streams of targeted traffic for small and big businesses in a matter of hours. However, many businesses shy away from PPC campaigns as they view it as a money drainer. This can most certainly be the case when the campaign is managed incorrectly.
Setting up a PPC campaign can involve an overwhelming amount of settings and options on some advertising platforms such as Google AdWords. For those who have little to no experience in this sort of marketing, several mistakes can be made during setup which can result in thousands of dollars being wasted.
On the other hand, those who have crafted several successful PPC campaigns know how effective Pay-Per-Click advertising can be; how much traffic it can drive and how much it can increase lead generation and boost sales.
If you have been struggling to get a good return (or any return) on investment from your PPC campaigns, or if you have been overwhelmed by the numerous settings and options, and do not know the right boxes to tick to run an effective pay-per-click campaign, this article is for you.
The following few tips will help you successfully set up a Pay-Per-Click campaign – they are also vital to having an effective PPC campaign in which there is a good return on investment for every single dollar spent. This way you will be sure to achieve your PPC marketing goals.
1. Optimize your landing page
Your landing page needs to be thoroughly optimized with the right keywords and links. If not, you risk a decrease in the ‘quality score’ of your landing page. A quality score determines how relevant or informative your content is for your chosen search terms. A landing page with a higher quality score is more likely to come higher on the PPC results for their search terms. So, when designing landing pages, it is a good idea to hire an experienced digital marketing agency that can provide an on-page SEO service, to ensure you increase your quality score.
Also, ensure your landing pages are relevant to the subject. One easy way to frustrate a prospective customer is to lead him or her to a landing page about designer shoes when they clicked on an ad about T-shirts. Irrelevant landing pages will only increase bounce rate and make your site look untrustworthy. Instead, ensure there is consistency in the landing page and the ad.
2. Use the right keywords
It is harder to optimize PPC campaigns when they are not segmented into smaller groups with closely linked keywords. Broad campaigns usually feature expensive keywords, and the cheaper ones are buried underneath.
For instance, a campaign for the keyword “digital marketing” is expensive and competitive. Instead, you should optimize for closely related keywords that are cheaper such as “digital marketing solutions” or “digital marketing in New York”, (with the assumption that your digital agency is in New York).
This way your pay-per-click campaign is more effective because your keywords are more precise and less competitive.
3. Use location-based bids
Location-based marketing ensures that you can filter out people who have no access to your services from seeing your ads and prevent wasting your PPC budget on useless clicks. Google AdWords has a location-based feature called ‘Local PPC’ or ‘Geotargeting’ that allows marketers to advertise to prospects in a certain location or ‘sets of locations.’
Geotargeting is very important to Bricks and Mortar businesses that rely on pedestrian traffic, such as hair salons, restaurants, and international eCommerce stores that ship products to individual countries.
Not everyone needs to see your ads, only your ideal customers should see them. Brick and Mortar businesses should target people living close to them because those are the people that can drive or walk to the store to purchase.
Little adjustments to your location-based bids can guarantee more targeted traffic. If you are a restaurant or a salon in London for instance, you would want to target only people staying in London. Furthermore, you may even want to target people in a specific area in London area, e.g., in East London. This way you can ensure your brand is reaching those who are most likely to visit your business.
4. Optimize your PPC campaign for both desktop and mobile
Mobile usage is continuously on the increase. As of April 2018, mobile devices, excluding tablets, accounted for 51.2% of total web page views from around the world. This means the bulk of traffic your ads will attract will most likely be from a mobile device. So, it will be unwise to not optimize your ads separately for mobiles.
Therefore, when setting up a PPC campaign, it will need to be segmented by device type. This way, you can handle mobile traffic separately from desktop traffic. Also, you will be able to create separate bids and funnels and track traffic separately.
5. Use negative keywords
One of the reasons people say PPC does not work is because they spend most of their marketing budget on irrelevant clicks by people with no purchase intent. This happens a lot when people use broad keyword match types because this allows related but not relevant search terms to trigger your ad. So, you end up paying for lots of clicks from people who never intended to search for your product or service.
If you want targeted traffic and a good return on investment on every single click you are paying for, you must use restrictive keyword match types and negative words. Adding negative keywords ensure you do not receive clicks when people search for those terms. For instance, if you sell fruits but do not sell oranges, you must add “oranges” to your negative keywords to prevent users from clicking your ads.
In Google AdWords, advertisers can set up a negative keyword list on a campaign level or single ad group. It is often recommended to set up your negative keyword on a campaign level as this will cover all segmented ad groups you have created for that campaign.
Conclusion
Pay-Per-Click still works. It remains one of the most effective forms of paid advertising if done rightly. When following the five tips discussed above, it ensures you run a successful PPC campaign.