Pay-per-Click (PPC) advertising is still one of the best ways to gain traction and direct traffic to your site. Today’s advertising networks offer more flexibility and features, allowing campaigns to run for specific objectives, from boosting the subscriber count of a YouTube channel to getting people to buy products and services.
Getting started with PPC advertising is also very easy. In fact, you can get your first Google Ads campaign approved in a matter of minutes. What’s difficult is creating an optimized campaign that isn’t just effective in achieving its objectives, but also very efficient in terms of cost per click. The tips and tricks in this article will help you do just that.
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Target by Location
Geolocation targeting is one of the best things about running a PPC advertising campaign today. You can be very specific about the areas you want to target. Combined with other parameters (i.e. interests) it is easy to create a highly targeted campaign.
Geolocation targeting isn’t the only tool you can use to be effective in a specific market. You can also optimize your ads for select audience groups. Use local references and leverage the campaign even further. Some tweaks to the copy of the ads will surprise you.
Drill Down on Keywords
Some keywords will produce better results than others; this is very common in PPC advertising. Rather than wasting valuable resources on ineffective keywords, you should direct focus on the high-performing ones. What you want are low-cost keywords with high conversion.
The simple approach is to direct more resources towards keywords that bring you more users or business. However, you also have the option to go a step further and optimize the bidding strategy for high-performing keywords to further boost your return on investment.
Get Help
One of the things about digital marketing that I really like is the fact that I don’t have to do everything by myself, and you don’t either. There are a lot of service providers and professionals who specialize in specific instruments of digital marketing. Working with a PPC company, in this instance, is a great option to consider.
Make sure you find a capable PPC advertising company to support your campaign. Good PPC companies always offer teaching and sufficient explanations, using testing to continue optimizing your campaign, and work fast.
That said, you want to be careful with companies that offer a lot for virtually nothing. If the guaranteed results are too good to be true, then they probably are, which means the company is best avoided.
Mind the Time
Next, we have a factor that many marketers still neglect: time. An effective advertising campaign puts the ad in front of the right target audience, in the right location, and at the right time. The latter is crucially important, since it often dictates how viewers respond to your ads.
Setting the right time for your ads is easy; this is a feature that Google Ads and other advertising networks have been offering for years. Choosing the right time for your ads, on the other hand, involves a bit more work.
You need to take the time to learn about your audience before you can understand the best times to show your ads in front of them. You can also learn from historic data to see patterns and spot times when your ads are most effective.
Go with the Funnel
Rotating ads is highly recommended, but simply rotating ads at random isn’t going to cut it. Your PPC ads need to work in tandem with other instruments. They also need to be in line with your sales funnel. When the three elements work seamlessly together, PPC advertising becomes a powerful tool for reinforcing key messages and triggering user actions.
For example, ads designed for new audience groups must focus more on introducing your brand and your product or service. Ads designed for those who have visited your site once should play a support role and reinforce the basic key messages about your products and your brand. A strong call to action can then be added to ads shown to users who are further along the funnel.
Can you see the dynamics? By strategically rotating your ads and matching them to the audience, you are making PPC advertising more powerful than ever. It may sound complex now, but it is actually very easy to execute with deep analytics and the wealth of tools available today.
Don’t Forget Devices
Tailoring key messages and ad content is also handy when you take additional metrics into consideration as you formulate your campaign. One of the most important metrics to factor in is the devices used by consumers. Ads intended for desktop users don’t always work when shown to users on their mobile devices.
It goes a step further than that too. When you create a targeted ad for mobile users, you also have more options on how you want the advertising to be displayed. You can add a Call button to the bottom of the ad to allow faster user reaction. Google Ads supports specific structures and content for mobile users.
Incorporate Dynamic Keywords
DKI is good for your CTR. This is a phrase that you will hear often as you venture deeper into the world of PPC marketing. Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) is indeed good for your Click-Through Rate (CTR). DKI is a way to add keywords to your PPC ads without breaking your message.
Let’s say you have an array of keywords that represent the products you have in store. You can use a string such as {Keyword:Product} to automate the process of adding those keywords to your copy.
If the “Phone” array includes GALAXY S10, iPhone XS, and Huawei P30 (with these phones being the products you sell online) and users search for Huawei P30, your ad:
Buy {Keyword:Phone} today!
will appear next to the search results as:
Buy Huawei P30 today!
and you are more likely to make a conversion. It’s easy to see now how DKI is good for your CTR, isn’t it?
So, these are the seven tips to keep in mind if you want to start boosting the performance of your PPC advertising campaign. For more PPC tips and strategies, stay tuned right here on this site.