A recent study found that nearly 45% of small businesses invest in PPC advertising. In today’s market, lacking a robust PPC or digital marketing strategy will simply not cut it for any size business.
To be truly competitive and make your new business findable, a sound PPC campaign is essential–but how is it accomplished?
We’ve got the answer with nine simple tips for creating a killer PPC campaign ASAP.
1. Create Target Profiles
You may think your business caters perfectly to the middle-aged, college-educated, male, but do you know who is actually clicking on your website ads most often?
When it comes to creating a good PPC campaign, doing target audience research pays…literally.
If you can develop an accurate target profile, you can write the perfect ad copy that will interest your ideal customer. This includes knowing what they need, general demographics like age, gender, etc., and other details like how they talk, what their interests are, and how they tend to spend their money.
Identify these details, and you can write ads just write to pique their interest.
2. Test and Test Again
Rarely, nay, more like never will you write the perfect ad copy on your first try. Finding just the right combination of keywords and phrases that will result in the biggest ROI for you will take trial and error.
This is not a bad thing.
It simply means that you will need to be constantly evaluating how your latest ads are performing and adjusting them for improvements.
The best PPC campaigns consist of continual testing and tweaking to create perfect ads.
3. Search Term Reports are Key
One key to creating great PPC campaigns is to avoid taking valuable tools for granted. The search term report is just such a valuable tool.
Use it as often as you can.
This handy report tells you how often people are using your search terms, which keywords will be good to include, new potential terms to try, and negative keywords to cut out.
Search term reports also show you what’s trending among potential customers searching for what your business has to offer. This tool is gold.
4. Timing is Everything
In the world of business, this idea is on-point in many ways, but knowing when and where to display ads may be just as vital to their success as wording.
Once your campaign has been up and running for a while, you can gather data on what times of day, and what locations in the world are most effective at reaching your target market.
With this data, you can save time and money by targeting ads to these specific times and places. The result? Better bang for your buck. Simply adjust your bids to match your data.
5. Bid Wisely
This tip can be broken up into so many areas as bidding well includes a lot of factors. But basically, you want to only bid for keywords or phrases that relate to your services.
Don’t waste money and time doing what is called “shot-gun bids.”
The more narrow you can identify your target market’s niche, and bid on those keywords, the more successful your PPC campaign will be. For example, if you sell uniquely shaped dog treats, it may be better to bid on phrases like, “fish-shaped dog treats,” than the much broader, “dog treats.”
6. Optimize Your Landing Pages
One of the most disappointing things that can happen in a PPC campaign is to have a high number of click-throughs, only to have people bounce once they hit your landing page.
How do you avoid this? Simply stated, don’t have cruddy landing pages.
Much goes into this of course, and optimizing your landing pages will require plenty of research and adjusting as you go.
Ideally, a landing page that will lead to conversions will make obtaining what customers are looking for simple and easy to do. Branding comes in to play here, as well as user-friendliness so work with your branding manager, marketing team, and site developer to create the best you can.
7. Use Every Extension Available
For those brand new to PPC campaigns, this may not be as obvious a tip. You can increase your click-through rate, quality score, and the space in your ads by using the doing things like using the new structured snippet extension.
You’ll also want to use Sitelinks, callout, location, review, call, and add every extension for Product Listing Ads.
8. Set Realistic Expectations
PPC campaigns are an excellent, even needed, means of gaining conversions. Still, their success does not occur overnight.
One of the most vital aspects of a good campaign is using the data you gain to hone and perfect your ads to garner even more success. Data takes time, sometimes weeks or months to gather enough to make smart choices about how to improve your efforts.
Be patient with your efforts, give things time to play out while still finding a balance between recognizing when something just isn’t working and you need to scrap it and move on.
9. Research, Research, Research
Before you begin your PPC campaign, research what channels your target audience are frequenting most often. You can have the best ads in the world, but if they’re not displayed where your target audience is, they’re useless.
You’ll also want to use tools to help determine which keywords are best for your business and services. SEM Rush, Google Search Tool, and Wordstream are all great keyword search tools, just to name a few.
The more you know about your audience, their habits, the channels they use, and what keywords are best, the more conversions your campaign will result in.
PPC Campaigns are Just the Beginning
Planning and implementing an effective PPC campaign is just one piece in the whole pie of being a successful digital marketer.
Let us help you find the best way to market your business online via everything from social media, to SEO, video, mobile, and more.
Check out our services page to learn more about how Trigger Digital can get you on the road to an effective marketing strategy.
