Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has the potential to grow your business quickly, it is a popular way of improving your brand’s visibility and increasing the number of leads or sales. These campaigns also increase traffic on your website, ultimately bringing you more conversions, regardless of your niche. Unlike search engine optimization (SEO), a pay-per-click campaign is going to bring you immediate results.
However, all of this success is contingent on whether or not you or your advertising manager knows strategies for managing PPC campaigns, especially with the immense PPC competition that businesses face nowadays.
A major reason why businesses opt for having PPC ads is to grow their business in a short amount of time. Even though these ads seem easy and straightforward, there are some things you should be aware of before you create a successful campaign.
Important things to keep in mind when it comes to optimizing your website are of course speed, user-friendliness, and relevance to your ad. Make sure that your website has lead magnets. Otherwise, all of the traffic your receive through ads will be pointless.
Below are Tips to guide you on how to perfectly manage a PPC campaign with ease.
1. Perform An Internal Audit
The first thing any responsible advertiser needs to do is audit themselves before running a PPC campaign. An audit is a comprehensive overview of your brand’s online presence.
Why audit yourself first? It’s simple: this is your chance to clean up your digital presence and to understand what you’re doing well and what areas need improvement.
Audit and improve your social media presence, website, email templates, and any other place where your brand can be found. This can improve your conversion rates before you spend any money on PPC. Think of auditing as troubleshooting.
You want to make sure that if you are going to spend a lot of money on sending traffic to your site, that you have set up the best possible user experience so you have the highest probability for converting those users.
2. Decide A Bidding Strategy
The next most important thing to pay attention to is selecting your bidding strategy. Depending on what kind of budget you’ll be working with, you’ll want to choose a bidding strategy. Google Ads lets you pick between manual, automated, and smart bidding.
Choosing your bidding strategy will also depend on your experience level with pay-per-click ads and your overall goals. Manual bidding is great for those working with smaller budgets because it allows you to put a cap on your cost per click (CPC). However, when working with manual bidding, you won’t be able to optimize your bids.
On the other hand, opting for automated bidding will mean that you’ll cut the time spent managing the campaign, but you’ll probably end up paying a bit more. Finally, smart campaigns are also automated campaigns, and they are probably the easiest to set up and manage, but they often give you subpar results.
3. Put Time And Effort Into Research And Creating Goals
Use research and your existing data such as site analytics, customer feedback, and industry trends to determine the best direction for your PPC campaign.
Once you have a general direction for your campaign, set goals. Remember to design SMART goals that you can measure after your campaign. This will make it much easier to determine what was successful and what needs to be adjusted in the future. Remember to align these goals with your company’s business.
4. Produce A Competitor Analysis
Because PPC is an auction-based platform, the bidding on the cost per click (CPC) can increase dramatically. This happens especially if you are competing against aggressive advertisers who are consistently increasing their bids. Because your competitors have a direct effect on keywords and bids, potentially increasing your cost, it is important to know how competitive your search terms are.
This competitor analysis, using tools like SpyFu, will provide you with a lens into how you stack up against your competitors. Identify low hanging fruit with a competitor analysis that keeps you ahead of the pack.
5. Retargeting
With an average rate of cart abandonment globally is 75%, using PPC ads for a retargeting campaign is an effective tool in sales conversion. The key to successful retargeting PPC campaigns is keeping it specific. For example, don’t target all visitors to your website, target those that were either viewing a particular product on your page or those who abandoned their cart.
6. Select A Budget
Your selected budget is an important part of your PPC campaign, and the good news is that you can still get great results even with a small budget. You’ll want to determine how much profit you’ll be making from each conversion and then how much of that profit you can afford to sacrifice as commission in your PPC campaign.
If you’re unsure how to do this, you can look at your past data and see what your conversion rate is, or simply use the industry standard. According to WordStream, a good conversion rate is anywhere between 2% and 5%.
After you’ve figured out your conversion rate, or you’ve chosen to use the industry standard, you should multiply that number with the maximum cost per click you ideally want and then multiply that with the number of days you want to run your campaign for. This will give you an estimated budget that would be perfect for your PPC campaign.
7. Build A Tree Structure
What are ALL the different veins and arteries with which people can find your business? Taking the time to identify all these unique categories will help you manage the account once it is up and running and also provide a superior return while running more efficiently. We call this stage the Tree Structure and we spend a full week solely surfacing all of the categories (and subcategories) that people can find our client’s businesses.
This is a very time consuming process and can be challenging depending on the complexity or nuances of your business. We mentioned earlier that Google makes it very easy to set up a Google Ads account and here at Logical Media Group, we subscribe to a philosophy that if it is difficult to do, then we should be doing it because the competition likely won’t.
8. Perform Keyword Research
Us nerds call keyword research the fun part but this could be the most time-consuming portion building a successful PPC campaign. Using a combination of your audience analysis, goals, and competitor analysis, brainstorm a list of keywords. The right keywords will be the difference between amazing results and outright failure.
A majority of PPC accounts look to the 80/20 rule, meaning 20% of the keywords in the account spend 80% of the budget, and also comprise 80% of the return. If you do not build out every category, you may end up not ever finding your 20%.
Once you’ve brainstormed keywords, use a tool to refine them. Ideally you want keywords with a high search volume and low competition or CPC. Remember to have a mix of long and short tail keywords to stay competitive. Here’s a quick guide from Google for keywords in PPC campaigns.
9. Define Ad Groups
Once you have your well-researched keyword list, it’s time to sort them into ad groups. Ad groups let you create hyper-targeted advertisements for higher engagement. You can also create customized landing pages for each segment of your audience. Get granular here: more relevant ads mean better-quality clicks!
10. Create Landing Pages And Ads
The best landing page is a specific landing page. Address audience pain points in the copy and highlight how your solution answers all of their problems.
You want to use target keywords in the landing page copy, but don’t be spammy about it. Avoid keyword stuffing and, instead, deliver content that’s valuable to your audience. When in doubt, you want to design for speed with landing pages. A one-second delay in load time means an 11% loss in page views. That’s a recipe for lost conversions and wasted ad spend.
Writing PPC ad copy is all about experimenting and seeing what’s best for your audience. Remember to include all essential components of the ad like the headline, brief text, and display URL. When you’re wondering how to run a PPC campaign, it’s important to make your unique selling proposition clear in the copy. Don’t forget to include ad extensions if they make sense for your campaign. Check out this Google resource to choose the right ad extensions.
11. Create An Impressive Ad
Now that you’ve got your landing page or website, bidding strategy, ad budget, and keywords all ready to go, it’s time to create your ad. Remember to always keep your ad copy straightforward and to the point. There’s not going to be a lot of time or room for grabbing the attention of potential customers.
All of your ad copies should be written with a clear goal in mind. Google Ads has a limited amount of characters for each of its fields.
There are three headlines that are 30 characters each, along with two descriptions with 90 characters each. There are also two Path fields, with a limit of 15 characters each, which are supposed to give your audience an idea of where they’ll end up after clicking on the ad link.
In order to grab the customers’ attention, try to come up with a unique and valuable copy that stands out from your competitors. Make sure that you clearly point out the benefit of using your service or buying your product that makes your brand special and different from the competition.
12. Consider PPC Campaign Management Software and Tools
Finally, after you’ve mastered all the steps toward managing a successful PPC campaign, you should know that there are also many useful tools that were created to help you better understand, manage, automate and optimize all of your paid ads. Often, these apps can help their users with automated bids and results reporting, among other things.
You can also use these tools for ad text creating, keyword research and suggestions, and even keyword grouping. These apps will help keep you organized and informed while providing you with strategic automation that will help you build your PPC campaign to its fullest potential.
A PPC campaign management app can also help you do competitor research and keep an eye on their strategies and tactics. Some of the most popular campaign management tools include Captivise, AdEspresso, Acquisio, and many others.