Developing a Winning PPC Strategy

 Developing a Winning PPC Strategy

Have you tried Google Ads and found that it wasn’t producing the results you had hoped for? This is a common story, however, it doesn’t have to be this way. The way people find businesses today makes being accessible on Google a necessity for businesses to grow. Unfortunately, most businesses don’t have the time or resources to rely on the long waits for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to start showing results (this isn’t to say that you shouldn’t try to improve your organic rankings, it just takes a long time for your efforts to kick in) and this is where Google Ads comes into play. Pay Per Click (PPC) can get your website in front of people much more quickly than SEO. But just because you have ads up on Google doesn’t mean you’re going to see results. There is a lot of competition for people’s attention and clicks can be tricky to get, and a click is just the beginning.

Instead of just running ads and hoping for the best, what you need for your PPC campaigns to produce is a strategy. There are a few things to consider when developing your strategy, both for ad creation and for analysis & optimization. Let’s take a look at some of them.

Tips For Creating More Effective Ads

Single Keyword Ad Groups

Google allows multiple keywords in a single ad group, but it is more effective to use a single keyword for each ad group. This allows you to get highly targeted with your ads. Having multiple keywords in an ad group means that the same ads will show for different keywords, reducing to one gives you more control over what people looking for what you do will see. A simple and effective way to see you click through rates increase, and to more easily keep track of which keywords are pulling the most weight, is to use 2 ad variants per keyword in single keyword ad groups. Relevancy is key to effective PPC Campaigns.

Use the Right Keywords

Picking the keywords you want your ads to show for shouldn’t be a guessing game. There are tools to help you see what people are typing in, take a look at the Google Keyword Planner, Google Search Console, Ubersuggest, SEMrush, and Soovle. Again, relevancy is essential to seeing results, choosing the right keywords is huge. Another thing to consider is the length of the keywords you choose. Although short-tail keywords are the most searched terms, they can actually end up harming your results and costing you money. Short-tail keywords leave too much room for intent, meaning most people who are searching for these terms are looking for reasons other than to convert. Focus more on medium and long-tail keywords, although they are searched less often, they show a much higher degree of intent to convert. Use negative keywords to help avoid showing for search terms that aren’t relevant to what you are offering.

Your Offer & Call To Action

Speaking of what you offer, this will be what attracts people to click and eventually do business with you. You need to make it clear that your offer holds a tremendous amount of value. This could be something like a free consultation, a webinar, etc. This needs to be paired with a CTA that grabs people’s attention. Remember that more people will read the headline of your ad than the description.

Consider the Temperature of Your Audience

What stage of your marketing funnel are people in when they encounter your ad? You should treat cold leads as such with your ads. Top of the funnel leads (cold leads) will be less receptive to ad strategies that would crush with hot leads. For example, when a lead is nice and warmed up, a free consultation is a great way to get them onboard, but this is much less effective for a cold lead. They either aren’t really on the search for what you do or are just at the beginning of looking into it and may be threatened by this assertive strategy. Instead, interesting content like blogs, infographics, or videos may be a better way to warm up these leads.

Analysis and Optimization

Once you’ve been running your ads for a while it’s time to look at your results and start tweaking. No PPC campaign is going to be perfect from the start, making small changes over time to see what’s working and what’s not is essential to developing a killer PPC campaign.

Use Negative Keywords to Your Advantage

As stated above, negative keywords are a great way to zoom in on what’s relevant to your business and those searching for what you do. After some time of running ads, you may find that you missed some irrelevant keywords that your ads are matching with.

Use KPI’s to Find Out Which Ads are Your Heavy Hitters

Not all of your ads will be winners of the bat. Use Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) to determine which of your ads are performing the best and double down on those. Look at KPI’s like Earnings Per Click (EPC) and Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) to help you figure out which ads are bringing you the most money. This combined with single keyword ad groups will tell you what leads are your highest converters. And remember that not all conversions are equal, you want to home in on the conversions that are more likely to produce sales. What this looks like depends on your business model.

Optimize Your Landing Pages

Although they’re important, ads are just a vehicle to get people to your site. You can have the greatest click through rate on the planet, but if your ads take users to a terrible landing page, then you’re wasting your money on ads. Spend time optimizing your landing pages so that they are relevant, have strong CTA’s and make it as easy as possible for people to convert. This is easier said than done, but use A/B testing to see what works and what doesn’t. Your website is the face of your company, take the time to make it look and function well.

There’s a lot that goes into running PPC campaigns that get results. A lot of business owners don’t have the time to run quality campaigns or the resources to have an in-house marketing department. Direct Placement LLC can help you with your marketing needs so you can focus on what you do best.

Direct Placement, LLC is a digital marketing agency that offers a variety of digital ads and services. Our trained and certified team of Account Managers and Internet Marketing Advertisers is dedicated to helping your business achieve its advertising goals. They will work diligently with you to help ensure our advertising efforts are tailored to your specific needs. Contact Direct Placement, LLC today or visit our website to discover how we can start transforming your business one click at a time! You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or Blogger for more online marketing related content.

Direct Placement makes digital marketing easy. Your Marketing Pro is a Google Premier Partner and ready to boost your ad to the top of search results. Get started now.