Cracking The Code - Strategies For Success In Ppc Advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a popular form of digital marketing that can help businesses reach new customers. However, success in PPC isn’t always easy.

In order to optimize your PPC campaigns, it’s important to keep track of key metrics like clicks, cost per click (CPC), and impressions. Here are a few tips to help you do just that.

1. Optimize Your Ad Copy

PPC ads can drive traffic to your website in an instant, but a significant portion of their success depends on the quality of your copy. Writing great ad copy means understanding your audience and their needs. Step into their shoes and consider the problems they are facing, or the solutions they want to find. Ads that speak directly to their pain points can make them feel more willing to engage with your business.

It's also important to review your keywords regularly. Using a keyword research tool can help you determine whether any of your keywords are negatively impacting your campaign, such as by generating clicks that don't convert. By reviewing your Search Term Reports, you can identify these negative keywords and replace them with high-performing ones. This can significantly improve your return on ad spend. You can also learn from your competitors' keyword strategies.

2. Optimize Your Ad Landing Pages

While it may seem obvious, driving traffic to your website is key to your PPC campaign. However, you need to ensure that the pages you send those users to are optimized for conversions. Otherwise, you'll spend money on clicks that don’t convert and lose valuable ad space.

Review your PPC click-through rates to identify the keywords your audience searches for most often. This can inspire you to rework your web copy to include the information your prospects search for most, and up your organic SEO potential. Then, you can skip past cold audiences and target solution-aware personas who are ready to buy.

3. Optimize Your Ads for Conversions

Optimizing your ads for conversions is an essential step in maximizing your clients' digital marketing ROI. Ads that are optimized for conversions can deliver better results at a lower cost.

To optimize for conversions, you must prioritize events in Events Manager and use the Conversion objective in Ads Manager. You can then tell Facebook how to optimize delivery based on these events at the ad set level.

For ecommerce marketers, this includes optimizing your ads for website conversions (click-lead-purchase). You can do this by using the "website visit" objective with specific conversion events such as purchases, free trials, and subscriptions.

You can also boost your conversion rate by bidding on competitor brand keywords and adding them to a "brand keywords" group. Just be sure to consider your competitors' differentiators, such as a bigger selection of products or prices, before targeting their name.

4. Optimize Your Ads for Ad Rank

Google’s Ad rank is based on the relevancy of keywords within an ad group to search queries. If the ad is not highly relevant it will have a low Ad rank and cost more to click or even not show at all.

Performing competitor keyword research is one of the most important tasks to complete before running any PPC campaign. There are many different tools that can help with this process but Ahrefs is by far the best for getting granular detail on how hard certain keywords are, new search terms and where people are searching from. This will also help you to avoid bidding on competitors branded terms. Instead consider RLSAs (remarketing lists for search ads) to target past website visitors. This will improve your ad relevance and your quality score. This will then help improve your Ad rank.

5. Optimize Your Ads for Quality Score

It’s important to optimize your ads for Quality Score, which determines how highly Google will rank your ad and where it will appear on the search engine results page. Doing this can help you to achieve better ad placements and lower costs.

To optimize your ads for Quality Score, start by reviewing the individual components of your ad and landing page. These include expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience.

It’s also a good idea to add your brand keywords to your PPC campaign(s). Branded keywords have higher conversion rates than non-branded keywords, according to Fathom, and can boost your ad quality score. However, be sure to carefully select and manage your branded keyword list to avoid unnecessary spend. Use a PPC management company to help you with this. They’ll be able to help you to create relevant and effective keyword lists that will drive conversions.

6. Optimize Your Ads for CPC

PPC ads are a quick way to generate leads and traffic for your website. But, if you don’t optimize your ads and website, it can be a huge waste of time and money.

You can use different automated bidding strategies to increase clicks, ad visibility, and conversions at a competitive price. However, the best one for you depends on your campaign goals and budget.

You can also try manual bidding, which gives you more control over your bids. But it can be time-consuming and requires constant monitoring to ensure that you’re bidding at the right times. Using automated bidding is typically the best choice for most advertisers. The goal is to get your ads in front of people who are most likely to convert on your website. That’s why it’s important to focus on your Quality Score.

7. Optimize Your Ads for CTR

When you optimize your ads, you can improve your click-through rate (CTR) and ad rank. Ads are shown to searchers based on their keywords and relevance. This makes it important to ensure your keywords are relevant to the products and services you’re advertising.

Agency Tip: Avoid bidding on competitor brand terms, unless you’re specifically competing against them. Instead, focus on differentiators, such as a larger selection of products or better pricing.

Review your campaign performance on a regular basis to remove underperforming campaigns or shift budgets. For example, if a client’s sunscreen ad performs well in Florida but not in Seattle, you may want to adjust your bids and targeting to reflect this. This will prevent wasting money on clicks that don’t lead to conversions. Instead, you’ll increase your ROI by focusing on the right people.

8. Optimize Your Ads for Behavioral Targeting

The days of simply punching in a few keywords, setting a budget and forgetting about your Google Ads campaign are long gone. Get it right, and PPC can be a powerful tool that boosts visibility, drives traffic and generates leads for your business.

One key to success is using long-tail keywords, which are more specific searches that are more likely to convert. To find these, use a tool like SpyFu to look at your competitors and see what keywords they are targeting. Then, add any of those to a tracking spreadsheet under a category called competitor keywords. Then, you can start building a list of generic terms to target as well. This will help you lower your CPC while increasing clicks, visibility and conversions. This will also help improve your Quality Score. Which, in turn, will improve your ad’s ranking and decrease the cost of your campaign.

9. Optimize Your Ads for Remarketing

If a PPC campaign isn’t producing a positive ROI, it may be time to consider shutting it down and redeploying the budget in other high-performing campaigns. Alternatively, it might be worth it to make manual bid adjustments to the underperforming campaigns to remove wasted spending and get them back on track to delivering a positive ROI.

Incorporating long-tail keywords into your ad groups can help you improve your ad relevance and decrease your CPC. These search terms are more specific than broader terms and typically convert at a higher rate, so it’s worth the investment to target them. Also, remember to utilize the Ad Schedule feature on non-branded campaigns so that your ads aren’t running during low-performance times. This is especially important for e-commerce clients. This can prevent them from wasting money on clicks that never result in a sale.

10. Optimize Your Ads for CPC Bids

Whether you’re using ECPC or another automated bidding strategy, the goal is to get the most clicks and conversions for your budget. This means optimizing your bids for keywords that have the highest value.

To do this, you can use competitor keyword research (usually done as part of the RFP or proposal stage). This will help identify competitors’ top keywords and the ad copy they use.

Be sure to avoid targeting branded terms, as this can significantly increase your cost-per-click. Instead, focus on finding keywords that are relevant to your client’s products and services. You can also add negative keywords to your ad groups, campaigns, or entire accounts. This will prevent your ads from showing up for irrelevant searchers, which can reduce your quality score and cause your CPC to increase. This can damage your return on investment over time.