Pay-per-click (PPC), or paid search advertising, is a form of online advertising that was developed to cater to today’s marketing and business landscape. Allowing businesses to feature their ads prominently on search engine results pages (SERPs), websites or content sites, it delivers an immediate return on your investment as well as generates immediate cash inflows for your business. PPC ads can also complement your inbound marketing efforts by generating quality traffic to your site and testing keywords at low risk.
If these benefits inspire you to kick start your first ever PPC campaign, do not just navigate to Google AdWords just yet. Designing PPC campaigns is a task that requires a lot of planning and strategizing to ensure that you enjoy all its advantages and maximize your ROI. Luckily, you are at the right place to get a head start on designing your campaign. The following lines detail 10 rules that can guarantee you an effective and successful PPC campaign strategy.
1) Identify Your Business Goals First to Follow Them Later
Nothing can be more damaging and destructive to your PPC campaign than having unclear and undefined business goals. Understanding underlying business goals helps you strive for the end point and gives you something to measure your success against once your PPC campaign is up and running. It is the foundation on which the rest of your PPC campaign (as well as the rest of your marketing strategies) rests upon. Hence, if you fail to determine your company’s goals and objectives, your business’s footing would be weak and on the brink of a major fall.
Determining your business goals does not have to be a very tedious task though. Simply answer the following questions and formulate your goals accordingly:
- What goal shall your PPC campaign aim to fulfill? (E.g. more sales, more brand awareness, increase in email sign-ups, increase in blog subscriptions, etc.)
- What actions would you want your audience or visitor to take when they visit your site?
- How much is each of the actions consumers take worth to your business?
Answers to the above questions will be really helpful to narrow down your company goals and ultimately help you develop a meaningful and relevant PPC campaign.
2) Understand Who Your Targeted Audience is and What They May Want
The central idea behind PPC marketing is to attract ‘targeted’ visitors to your site and then effectively convert them into buyers and loyal customers. Even though it is not that hard a task to get a lot of clicks, but acquiring clicks from ‘qualified’ sales leads (i.e. people who are willing to become your customers) is difficult to accomplish. As a result, it is necessary to define your audience during the initial stage, before you dive into other stuff like keyword targeting and creating ads.
In order to get this right, honestly answer the following questions:
- Are you a B2B or a B2C?
- Who you are targeting?
- Where does your potential customer base reside?
- Why do you think your target audience needs your product?
- What type of keywords would your audience use when searching for your kind of products or services?
- Which medium (e.g. mobile, tablets, PCs.) is your audience likely to choose when searching for your product or service?
The more specific your questions are, the better your chances of understanding your targeted audience and gaining insights to their minds. This, in turn, will aid you in designing better targeted ads, landing pages, and other elements that directly target your audience. As a result, you will be on your way to running successful PPC campaigns.
3) Work Out Your Budget Beforehand
Setting up a budget for your PPC campaign is another fundamental element of designing one. This is because you need to understand the level of monetary risk your company is ready to take as well as capable of taking. While PPC does deliver immediate results if you adopt an effective strategy, you still need to spend a bulk of cash upfront to get your campaign started, and then some to make payments on the number of clicks. Therefore, you may not get money back immediately.
Be forewarned: PPC expenditures can easily skyrocket if one does not monitor their expenses closely. In simpler words, if you do not set up your budget properly and plan ahead of time for surprise costs, you will be forced to face tight finances.
4) Carefully Choose the Best Channel for Your Ads
PPC advertising is the process of displaying ads on a third party website with the singular goal of creating brand awareness and driving traffic to your site. There are plenty of internet marketing channels where you can place your ads, including Google AdWords, Bing Ads, Yahoo! Search Marketing, Business.com Advertising, and even Facebook.
With so many options available, choosing the channel best suited for your company can seem like a daunting task. Luckily, we are here to help. To narrow down your selection effectively, concentrate on the following three (major) elements:
- Company Goals
- Budget
- Target Audience
Regardless of the above factors, starting your PPC campaign with Google AdWords is perhaps the most reasonable idea. Apart from being an ultra-popular advertising platform, therefore capable of ensuring maximum exposure to a larger audience, AdWords is easy to set up and is also relatively inexpensive.
While there are many other platforms which boast an even lower cost-per-click (CPC), these may not offer you access to a larger audience. So, choose a marketing channel after investing much thought in your decision and thoroughly comparing and contrasting the qualities of each of the channels with your business goals in mind. If you have the funds for a few tests, you can ran your ads on more than one PPC channel to determine which one can provide you with more visitors and better conversions.
5) Build an Impressive Keyword Strategy
Having a keyword strategy in place is very important as keywords are what really trigger the ads to be displayed on search engine result pages. An impressive keyword strategy entails researching keywords, selecting the most relevant ones, and finalizing them.
Keyword Research is another vital part of PPC management as it helps you target your potential customers and drive them to your site. You can access various free online keyword research tools to help you research relevant and high ranking keywords. Google AdWords Keyword Planner, Bing’s Keywords Research Tool and Ubersuggest are some of the most popular ones.
Next comes selecting the right keywords. For that, you need to put yourself in your potential audience’s shoes and think about what they may type in the search engine bar while looking for your product or services. You can also input your competitors’ websites in the keyword tools to find out which ones they are currently focusing on. With these in hand, you can finally finalize your keywords and bid on them. Make sure to bid on the keywords which accurately describe your company, products and services so that you can capture more traffic and, consequently, ensure more conversions.
6) Create Separate Keyword Buckets for Each of Your Campaign’s Ad Groups
While writing ads for your PPC campaign, including keywords in your copy where appropriate reinforces the relevance of your ad to both the search engine and the searcher. As a result, you can maintain a high quality score in search engines like Google. However, stuffing all of the keywords in a single ad copy is not a really smart idea. Instead, you should group separate keywords together and use them in individual ad copies. Doing so ensures accurate market segmentation, higher click through rates, and eventually higher conversions. Again, there are numerous online tools that can help you group your keywords for separate ad copies, so make sure to use them.
7) Design Ad Copy that Attract and Captivate Your Audience
Now that the foundation of your campaign is built and relevant keywords are selected and contained within multiple ad groups, your next concern is to develop strong and creative ads. Despite being published on a different medium, PPC advertising is still about unleashing your inner creativity.
Your ad copy should be well-written, concise and on point if you wish to attract and captivate your intended audience. Because you are limited to a specific number of characters for each ad copy, you should not waste your time (and money) on purposeless characters. Instead, you should make your headline count as it is the most prominent aspect of any ad and the element that can best grab your audience’s attention.
To further ensure the success and effectiveness of your PPC campaigns, your ad copies must comply with the following rules:
- Be attractive yet relevant through the right keywords
- Be informative and engaging yet focused
- Be concise yet descriptive
All in all, your ads must be appealing and compelling enough to serve your primary purpose of generating traffic.
8) Do Not Forget to Include a Call –to-Action
It is imperative to include a call-to-action at the end of your ads. Despite the number of times this aspect has been emphasized on, it is surprising to see how many marketers and advertisers fail to register its importance and, eventually, forgo including a call to action in their ads. What they fail to understand is that this is their chance to tell their audience what they should do and what their next step is once they arrive on the site.
Even when a call-to-action is included, it is inappropriate, unclear or simply not in accordance with their goal more often than not. For instance, if your goal is drive user engagement, a ‘Buy Now’ call-to-action is far from relevant. If your PPC campaign’s aim is to increase conversions, this call to action would be ideal. Remember, however, that the call-to-action on your ad copy should coincide with call-to-action of the landing page the ad is directed to. If that is not the case, your website’s bounce rates will increase and your competitors will have a field day since your traffic will be heading their way.
9) Develop Landing Pages and Optimize Them According to Your Ad Copy
The key to a successful PPC campaign is having a fully optimized landing page greeting people who clicked your ads. A landing page is where the user is directed to and where the real action takes place as this is where users actually buy or subscribe. Unfortunately, even if you have the most amazing landing page, it may fail to convert because it may be missing any one of the following crucial characteristics:
- A call-to-action that coincides with the ad
- Related content to the product or service featured on the ad copy
- Feature price, shipping costs and other FAQs
- Quick page loading time
You should create multiple landing pages, test them to see which drives more conversions, and continually optimize. As this is never a one-time activity, be ready to accommodate constant improvements.
10) Create Multiple Ad Copies and Launch Test Campaigns
It is amazing how PPC campaigns are carried for years and years without tracking software to test the performance and effectiveness of these campaigns. Since you are spending large amounts of money on the campaign, it is only natural (and logical) that you track and measure the performance of your ads against your predefined goals. In fact, by creating multiple ad copies (at least three variations of your ads), you can determine what kind of ads drove the most conversions and were more effective. You can then analyze the differences in click through rates for each and make any necessary changes.
Stick to these ten rules while creating your next PPC campaign and you will be set to succeed. If you need more help, consult with our experts. Our experience and skills make us the best PPC specialists around, so get in touch for a consultation right away.
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