6 Proven Expert Tips to Improve the Performance of Your PPC Campaigns
Depending on the size and type of your business and its associated products and services, running a PPC (pay-per-click) campaign may prove to be the most profitable option. With a small fee paid to Google or other companies for every click that has brought a visitor to your website, you can easily receive more money than you spend.
Of course, this only applies if you know what you are doing. Starting a PPC campaign without any previous preparation, knowledge, and research is, in fact, a recipe for disaster.
With that in mind, here are some useful tips about improving PPC campaigns, which will help you optimize your Pay Per Click marketing performance and bring more potential customers to your doorway. Remember, preparation is key, so go through our advice and design a campaign that will be optimal for your specific situation.
Have Clear and Realistic Objectives
The first step toward creating a successful PPC campaign is to determine what your goals are. Without precise, carefully determined goals, you will be far-off from achieving the maximum potential of your campaign. It will be chaotic and perhaps even successful to a point as a result of luck rather than a carefully orchestrated plan of action.
So, before anything else, determine your main goal. It could be to simply increase the number of people who visit your website or perhaps the number of sales or people on the verge of buying. You can also work toward increasing your brand’s exposure to potential buyers, higher visibility, and more followers on social networks, and so on.
Then, think of the smaller goals, which will comprise the main goal. By organizing your campaign objectives in such a way, you can keep track of progress more accurately. However, it is important to be realistic and optimize your PPC campaign so that its objectives are achievable in the determined time-frame.
Remember that your plan drives your campaign. If the plan is unrealistic, all of it will suffer in the process. Also, it is always suggested to pre-define your overall digital marketing budget and stay on it.
Which Platform to Use?
Some people who are running PPC campaigns do not realize that Google Ads is not the only PPC platform that can turn out to be useful and profitable in the long run. You can also use Twitter or Facebook Ads. Your options are to choose just one of these platforms or, if your budget allows it, use all three.
When using Google Ads, various services are offered. You can choose search queries that will be connected to your brand whenever a target audience uses them while Googling. Moreover, there are ads based on a static visual display, and those that are designed for YouTube, whereupon your video is featured as an ad on YouTube.
If you use Facebook Ads, your content will appear as sponsored posts in the newsfeed of certain demographics, based on the data you have put in. There is a robust system on Facebook for detailed customization of your ads. We have discussed the importance of having clear objectives in the previous paragraphs. Well, this is one of the things you can set-up on Facebook, along with ad type and the audience it should target.
As for Twitter, it is not that different from Facebook – you get to choose between similar options. In practice, these boil down to audience demographics that should be targeted and the objectives of your PPC campaigns. Ads will then appear on the newsfeeds of people who use Twitter and match your targeted demographics. There is a larger number of options for campaign goals. This allows you to customize your tactics slightly more efficiently.
Keywords are Extremely Important
Once you have a solid plan, it is time to work on the best keywords that will boost the performance of your Pay Per Click campaigns. Keywords are, of course, very important – they will bring lots of visitors that will turn into customers later on – provided that they are carefully chosen and not misleading to potential customers.
Keywords will require a bit of experiment and some trial and error before you can maximize their value. If your website has been online for some time now, then you can start optimizing keywords right away. The formula is simple: focus your attention on those keywords that have brought most of the new visitors to your website. These keywords are the ones that your visitors are interested in, and will also improve your Google Ads quality score. Of course, you can still introduce new keywords that have the potential to attract new visitors.
On the other hand, there will be some keywords that provide little to no value to your website. You can safely disregard those that bring no impressions. Without any impressions, you cannot expect to have clicks and conversions, so these keywords are practically useless.
If the keyword is generating impressions, but little or no clicks and conversions, you will have to optimize your advertising content in different ways. For example, you may need more precise ad copies, or the problem could lie with your website. Ads could be connected to your homepage instead of the landing page. You should always avoid this problem, as ads and landing pages should always work in unison.
Ad Extensions
Using ad extensions can improve the performance of your PPC campaigns, so it is a good idea to look into the various ad extension types. Choosing the right one for your campaign will bring more good than just randomly selecting one that is not compatible with your campaign.
But, what are these ‘ad extensions‘? In short, this is a format that displays some extra information on your brand, product, or service. With more carefully selected data provided to customers, the likelihood of attracting buyers will rise. They will become more acquainted with your product or service in a way that you have designed.
Types of Ad Extensions
- Extensions with information on how to reach you – by phone, e-mail, or in the real world with a map and the address of your company. Such information removes the trouble on behalf of your potential customers who would have to search for this information on their own.
- Ad extensions that are designed so that the users can call you easily, simply by pressing a button on an ad. Again, this removes some hassle on the customers’ side.
- Having more than one landing page can be useful. More landing pages will direct potential customers to whatever it is that might turn them into actual ones. The ‘sitelinks extensions‘ can make this happen by introducing several landing pages on one ad.
- Online reviews can be of great assistance with increasing the amount of trust the potential customers have in your company. Therefore, the extension which integrates online reviews with your ads can be very useful.
- Suppose you are running PPC ads for an app, or there is a supplementary application that goes along with your product or service. In that case, you can use ad extensions that will include a direct link to your app, wherever it is located online.
Create an Attractive Headline
If you are running a new small business and using the PPC ads (as you should, because some say Google Ads are better than SEO for new businesses), then you likely have little experience with designing enticing ad copies. One thing that newcomers often do not think about is related to the way the headline is written.
Headlines are extremely important. They are the first and often the last thing that a potential buyer will look at. But, do not focus only on the ‘catchiness’ of your headline. A headline that is easy to understand and clearly offers the products/services that the potential visitor is looking for is equally powerful, if not more important.
Apart from that, there are several crucial points to think about while creating your PPC ad copy headlines:
- According to psychology experts, people like to feel different and important. So, use this to your advantage by emphasizing that the offer is exclusive in a way, or that the potential visitor was hand-selected.
- Make the headline interesting by using creative constructions. Avoid prosaic descriptions and try to think out of the box while simultaneously trying to represent your product or service accurately.
- Do not use words that show that you are not confident in your product or service. For example, do not write something like: “This product could easily improve your life-satisfaction”. Instead of that, use a headline like: “This product will surely improve your life-satisfaction!”.
Always Rely on A/B Analysis
In order to accurately determine and improve the performance of your PPC campaigns, it is highly recommended to run A/B testing regularly. It is the kind of analysis where you compare option A with option B. The tests should run for a minimum of a few days in order to get correct results.
The best option for a beginner is to analyze only one aspect of the PPC campaign during one test. Experimenting with multiple aspects at the same time is possible, but it greatly increases the number of variables and makes the results confusing. Unless you are an expert who knows exactly what he/she is doing, this is not recommended.
With A/B tests, you can analyze the landing page or the PPC ad itself. So, on the one hand, you can test the look and feel of your landing page and its individual visual components. Don’t test the pictures and the landing page overall design at the same time. When it comes to ads, you can change Headline A with Headline B or try using different keywords.
It is important to emphasize that A/B analysis is an invaluable tool as long as you want to run and optimize your PPC campaigns. Therefore, you should never stop using it in order to maximize the performance of your PPC campaigns at a given time. Conduct tests regularly, and not only when your campaigns are unsuccessful.
Final Thoughts on Improving PPC Campaigns
So, there you have it. As we said, PPC campaigns can be a highly profitable tool – when used properly, they will significantly increase the number of visitors and buyers. They will also be of great help with improving your brand awareness.
It is important to stress that, at first, you may not achieve the results you have craved straight away. However, much like with many other things in life – practice makes perfect. After the initial period of experimenting with keywords and lots of A/B testing, you will gradually begin to attract more and more traffic and capture more leads.
Don’t give up, keep working, and you’ll get there eventually. Good luck!
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Being an entrepreneur and digital marketer, he loves to share his knowledge and experience in topics related to internet marketing, SEO, SEM, social media, content marketing, branding, entrepreneurship, and many more.
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