Successfully designing and managing a Pay Per Click advertising campaign can be a highly effective, yet challenging endeavor for even the savviest of marketing experts. Many PPC campaigns end up unsuccessful simply because their managers have no idea how to optimize them towards the right audience.
If you want your PPC campaign to deliver a profit to your company, then you're going to need some guidance on how to ensure that your customers will start clicking on your ads and offering up crucial conversions. Following, we'll cover some of the most effective and efficient ways to maximize your PPC ad results, through accurate and careful optimization.
1. Start by Researching Search Terms
One of the most important factors in any PPC campaign are the search terms you use to attract your audience. Before you begin bidding for terms, you'll need to think about your brand, the type of audience you're trying to appeal to, and what sort of language they are most likely to use. In AdWords, you can find search terms underneath the "Dimensions" tab. From here, users can consider the search terms used on a campaign basis, or ad group, as well as which words are used in any given time period. In other words, you can gain a direct insight into which search queries trigger your ads the most.
Often, the information you gather from researching search terms can be quite surprising - and it's ideal for optimizing your bidding techniques and reducing the amount of your budget wasted on terms that deliver no results. For the most efficient PPC campaigns, use modified broad match, and exact match bidding. Modified broad match use a + before the keywords to be included in a user's query for an ad to be triggered. Unlike exact match bidding, modified bidding allows brands to take advantage of long-tail searches, while maintaining crucial boundaries. You can also use your search terms to conduct negative keyword research at a later point in your campaign.
2. Make Your Landing Pages Ad-Specific
One of the most common mistakes that many marketers make when attempting to draw in new customers through PPC advertising, is creating generic landing pages for every ad within a campaign. Although this can address the concept of maintaining a consistent brand image, and reduce the amount of effort you'll need to put into any campaign, it also means that your user might be directed towards a landing page which isn't particularly relevant to the content of the advertisement they just clicked on.
Not only is landing on an irrelevant landing page confusing for your customer, but it's also frustratingly bad for your SEO efforts. Irrelevant landing pages are one of the main reasons why users bounce away from landing pages, and refuse to return the next time they see your ad - even when you use retargeting efforts. The best solution is to have a landing page specific to each ad you create, so that you can maintain a smooth buying journey for your customer.
3. Split Test Your Ad Copy
While it might not be a new or innovative solution in the world of digital marketing, split-testing remains to be one of the best ways to examine and evaluate your ads. Testing is essential to PPC campaign optimization, and ad copy is one of the factors that is most commonly overlooked by many marketers. Remember, your ad copy can influence your keyword quality scores, while changing the ways users respond to, and interact with your brand.
Use split testing wherever possible to gather as much information about your campaigns as possible. Although this process requires detailed tracking and organization measures, as well as a great deal of persistence - it is essential if you want to make the most out of your marketing budget. The primary objective should be to determine the semantics that are most effective in driving click-through rate.
4. Stay On Top of Trends
Finally, don't make the mistake of thinking that you can place your PPC campaign on autopilot after you reach a certain point in your advertising strategy. One of the most crucial steps in making your PPC efforts work for you is taking the time to constantly keep on top of what's going on within the digital marketing industry. The world of PPC, just like various other aspects of marketing, is constantly evolving, and you'll need to keep pace if you want to keep advertisements relevant, and get ahead of your competitors.
If you're constantly looking for new ways to upgrade and improve the optimization of your ads, then you can rest assured that you'll enhance your chances of more clicks, better engagement, and higher conversions.
