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PPC campaigns are one of the most useful weapons in the armory of the digital marketer. Running paid ads on search engines like Google and Bing is a great way to reach your customers in an extremely targeted way, and a successful PPC campaign can make a huge difference to your business.
The great thing about advertising on platforms like Google is that you reach your customers at the exact moment they are looking for you. They’ve just typed in “buy golf clubs online” and there you are with some great ad copy, telling them about what golf clubs you sell.
Not only can you reach these people at the exact moment they’re looking for your products, but your ads can also be highly targeted through variables like the location. This means that if you can get your PPC campaigns running well, they can be the perfect way to get your ideal customers to your website.
However, getting your PPC campaigns running how you want them can be a bit tricky, so here are three things to consider when planning your next campaign.
1. Focus on Your Landing Page
Before we even consider our adverts, it’s important to think about the landing page we’re using for those adverts. Once people click on your advert the landing page is the first thing they see, and it needs to make an immediate impression.
If your landing page is slow to load, isn’t relevant to what the user is looking for, or isn’t aesthetically pleasing, then that user is simply going to click out of your page.
Not only does this mean you’ve paid for the click without even having the opportunity to convert that click into a lead or a sale, but a high bounce rate and low time on page will negatively affect your adverts.
Google wants to send its users to great content, and if it doesn’t think your landing page is good enough then it will show your ad less and less. In order to gauge how your advert and landing page are doing, look at Google’s Quality Score.
2. Focus on Your Keywords
For your landing pages to be relevant, you have to have the correct keywords. Let’s go back to golf clubs. If you’re advertising for the keyword new golf clubs, but your webpage only sells vintage, used golf clubs, then the person that clicked your advert isn’t going to find the page relevant.
In order to get the most focused keywords, you need to understand how to use different keyword matches to maximize the effectiveness of your keywords.
- Broad match
- Broad match modifier
- Phrase match
- Exact match
- Negative match
For help with the different match types, look at Searchbloom’s Keyword Wrapper Tool.
Another important part of keyword selection is negative keywords. In the new golf clubs vs. vintage, used golf clubs, if you see that you are getting clicks for keywords that are not relevant to you like new golf clubs, then you can add those terms to your negative keyword list so that you don’t show up for those queries.
3. Remember It’s an Advert
You’ve got to remember that your PPC campaign is advertising, and just like any other form of advertising, you’ve got to entice your customer into clicking your link.
Because you’re quite limited in the amount of text you can use in a Google ad, some people seem to forget that you’ve still got to sell yourself.
Be concise, but give your potential customer a reason to click. The fact that you’ve got little space to work with just gives you an even better opportunity to use your copy skills to maximize your click-through rate.
Make sure you’re using all of the ad space you’re paying for by using Google’s ad extensions to your benefit and put a concerted effort into writing great copy.