Reaching the right audience with the right content at the right time is very important in this digital competitive world. So, PPC gives you the power to control your traffic and reach audiences at the right touch-points.
So, Here is your ultimate guide to maximize your PPC campaigns to bring in new leads, increase conversion rates, and drive more ROI to your business.
In other words Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC Advertising) your simply "directing your market towards your goal fulfillment".
To get started, Pay-Per-Click is a model of advertising where you pay each time your ad is clicked, rather than getting clicks organically. Digital marketing is more efficient when your marketing strategies are targeted at the right audience. With Google Ads pay-per-click campaign, you can easily segment your market and directly target and optimize your paid ad campaigns. The status (shown below) shows the efficiency of PPC in online marketing campaigns.
Digital Marketing is a term used to describe the various ways of promoting a business via search engines, social media marketing, content marketing and entails both organic and paid strategies. Organic is based on unpaid, natural traffic, and can be optimized with various SEO, SMO practices. In contrast, paid advertising means you pay a fee to publishers’ to have your business displayed at various places targeting views intend, geographic, demographics, interests, etc. Ad Placements on different sites will display the ads that you create to direct viewers to your site, and the fee you pay is usually based on either click (Cost Per Click, CPC) on or views (Cost Per 1000 Impressions, CPM) of these ads.
Check Out Some PPC Advertising Stats:
50% of search users who click on a PPC ad are more likely to purchase than users who click on an organic result (Unbounce)
65% of B2B companies have acquired their business customer through LinkedIn paid ads. (HubSpot)
PPC can help boost brand awareness by 80% (Google)
53% of clicks on paid ads come from mobile devices (PowerTraffick)
87% of Facebook’s advertising revenue is generating from mobile ads. (AdWeek)
Well, to maximize your PPC campaigns to bring in new leads, increase conversion rates, and drive more ROI to your business, a Proper campaign strategy is essential.
Let’s go through the process below
Set Your Campaign Goals:
You must start the campaign by getting insights about your goals.
Questions to ask yourself include:
Do you want to build brand awareness?
Do you want to enhance traffic to the website?
Do you want to improve sales?
Do you want to increase leads?
How will you know that the campaign was successful?
Asking yourself these questions will give you the base to build a successful PPC campaign.
Doing Smart Keyword Research:
To target the right audience, you need to choose keywords that users are likely to include in their search queries when searching for your products or services. Understand that it takes some time to do quality research on which keyword we wanted to use, but it is absolutely necessary for a successful PPC campaign.
While keyword research is one of the initial stages for any campaign, it's should be a continuous process to recheck your keywords search volume and strategies accordingly to get the best possible results. You can also do a Keyword Gap Analysis to see where you stand compared to your competitors.
You can do the keyword research using Google Keyword Planner or SEMrush Keyword Analyzer (Keyword Gap Analysis).
Next is Competitor Analysis:
By completing a competitor analysis, you can decide how your business stacks up against the competition in your market. You will be looking at the following aspects:
Who is dominating the ad space? and Why?
What your competitors are doing? and where can you make the difference?
What strategies are they using?
This process allows us to know threats that need to be addressed or opportunities you can take advantage of.
Creating Stunning Ad Copy:
The next step is creating a stunning copy to be used for the campaign. During this process, you utilize the keywords you identified and create various permutations of the same ad (Either Text Ad or Display Ad). This allows us to test various ads against each other to determine which is giving the best ROI. Optimizing your ad copy in regular intervals is required and it is also a never-ending process as audience and industry trends keep changing.
Creating a Perfect Landing Page:
Your landing page may either be an existing page on your website, or a dedicated landing page with content tailored towards a specific category in your product or services catalog for which you are running the ads.
You need to create the content for your landing page based on what part of the marketing funnel your target audience is in, keeping your campaign goals in mind throughout the way is really important.
Landing page creation includes both design and copy creation to ensure consistency and relevancy between your website content, brand message, and ad copy.
You can create one such Landing Page on Unbounce
Choosing Your Campaign Type:
Well, the other important thing you need to do before starting a PPC campaign is, you’ll have to decide one of the campaign types: search ads, display ads, or video ads.
1. Search ads are text-based ads that are displayed with search results on a search engine results page (SERP).
2. Display ads are generally image-based ads and are shown on web pages within the Platforms Display Network.
3. Video ads are typically in video format which lengths between six and 20 seconds and appears on Platform like YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn or any other Video Display Network.
Finalizing Your Bid Strategy:
Before you get started with your bid strategy,
Let us try to understand how PPC works
So, what determines how much you pay per click? Google, Facebook or say any PPC Advertising platform uses an auction-style bid to set cost per click. For any given keyword you have the top bidder, let’s say the bidder bid's $10.00 for someone to click on their ad. Then you have the next highest bidder who pays $8.00 per click, and the next one pays $7.00 per click, and the next once pays $5.00 per click, and so on, all the way down to the last bidder who has the cost he gonna pay per click on their ad for that keyword as, let’s say $3.75.
Now, these are not the costs you actually pay for each click. Instead, the lowest of these bids is used as the price for the least visible spot on the results page, and then each spot going up in cost at an incremental dollar price (lets us assume $.05 incremental bid for this example). So in this case, the top bidder ends up paying only $3.95 per click, even though they bid at $10.00.
It's not all about bidding, While your bid plays an important role in deciding whether or not your ad is served for a given keyword, Google also uses something called “quality score” in making this decision.
So, What is Quality Score?
Quality score is an algorithm that scores each of your ads for relevancy, it examines how closely your keyword relates to your ad and how closely your ad relates to your page content to ensure that you’re not buying keywords and directing traffic to irrelevant pages.
The reason for including quality score is to provide an optimal user experience for their audience. It used to be that ad placement was determined solely by bids, but then someone could easily bid on “Mobile Phone” which has a higher reach volume when they were selling "dry fruits" which has low reach volume. Google, Facebook, and other platforms introduced quality scores to make sure that the ads they were displaying were always relevant to the search terms or displayed content and to keep their advertisers in check.
The quality score is on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest. What this indicates is that if your competitor bids on a keyword at $10 and has a quality score of 5, and you bid on that same keyword at only $6 but you have a quality score of 7, ad placements may give you the top position for the price you bid because your ad is more relevant. It makes sense to show your ad to the targeted audience because it is more relevant, which makes it more likely that viewers will click on it.
Now that you know how PPC works and its relevancy, you now need to Strategize the bid which is essential for maintaining a healthy PPC campaign. You must follow a methodology in order to define bidding strategies. The bidding strategy is largely defined by the goal of the campaign, as every goal requires a different bidding strategy.
Well, you need to considerations a few things when strategizing your bid:
Should have an idea on the recommended budget for the entire campaign
Do a quick research on the Cost per click (CPC) of each PPC ad you wanted to give Vs Industry CPC benchmark
Do some approximate calculation on what kind of returns we may end up getting from a particular ad campaign
Considering and analyzing the above factors you can give you a better idea of the ROI and success of the campaign.
Understand Marketing Funnel:
Using the funnel method to lead PPC users towards your desired goal is one of the most efficient marketing methods today. This strategy is effective in driving visitors and directing traffic where you need it to go when your audience is ready to move forward. This four-step process includes the following:
Implementing Remarketing:
Remarketing is a way to connect with people who previously visited your website or webpage. It allows you to strategically position your ads in front of these audiences (who have visited your website) as they browse, thus helping you increase your brand awareness or remind those audiences to make a purchase.
Remarketing is one of the most effective strategies at funneling and directing traffic, as it promotes brand recall each time your visitors see your ad. Remarketing also leads your audience back to your website when they are willing to complete a conversion, it can be, filling a form, downloading an eBook, purchasing an item or anything which you have set as your campaign goal.
Analyzing your Results:
Well, now that you have your ads, keywords, and account structure, and you want to optimize all of these. The only way you can optimize your campaign is by using the metrics and reports of your campaign. Let’s take a look at the metrics you should be considering, and why each is so important.
Four primary metrics that are essential for paid search: Impressions, Clicks, Conversions, and Spend.
An impression is an instance of your ad being displayed to your targeted audience. So you can analyze the number of impressions to be roughly the number of people who look at your ad, or at least the number of viewers to whom the ad is displayed.
A click is an occurrence of a viewer clicking on your ad once it has been displayed. This is different from the number of impressions because the viewer actually clicks on your ad, not just that your ad is displayed to the viewer.
A conversion is an instance of a viewer that viewed your ad, clicked on it, and took the action on the landing page. This action could be downloading an offer, purchasing your product, subscribing, filling out a form, etc. When you set up your PPC account it gives you a tracking code, which will be added on your thank-you page (the page which comes after the action completed by the viewer) that lets you know when someone has completed an offer or bought something, so they can keep track of conversions.
Spend is nothing but the sum of money that you have spent on your campaign so far.
These four primary metrics are simple to track, but the analysis that will be the most critical for optimizing your campaign using these metrics are derived from combinations of these simpler ones:
Click-Through Rate (usually called as CTR) is the percentage of impressions that convert into clicks. The more the percentage goes up, the more efficient your campaign is.
CTR = Clicks / Impressions
Conversion Rate is the percentage of clicks that convert into conversions. This is also a metric that indicates increasing efficiency as it goes up.
Conversion Rate = Conversions / Clicks
Cost Per Click (usually know as CPC) is the amount of money you have spent on each click. You can get the average CPC by dividing the total spend by the total number of clicks. This is a cost metric, so increasing efficiency means CPC should be as low as possible.
CPC = Spend / Clicks
Cost Per Acquisition (usually called as CPA) is the amount of money you’re spending on each conversion. You can calculate the average CPA by dividing the total spend by the total number of conversions. Again, this is a cost metric, so you should try to keep your CPA as low as possible.
CPA = Spend / Conversions
To conclude, PPC Advertising is a reliable advertising technique and it is 100% data-driven. It is the fastest way to grow your customer base and gain leads and should be a part of your digital marketing strategy.
Here are a few important takeaways to remember:
Creating and adjusting goals in regular frequency to match with industry standards
Introduce new keywords whenever it is necessary and also key an eye on nonperforming keywords and remove them.
Aim for high-quality scores to enhance performance and reduce costs.
Your money can go waste easily, so be careful about how you choose to spend it.
Optimize! Optimize! and Optimize! There’s never a lack of ways to improve your PPC campaign. Keep improving, so you can push your campaign performance up and your overall costs down and ultimately run a successful PPC campaign.
Additional Info:
Some of the best platforms for running PPC Advertising Campaigns are:
Well, If you still have anything to add, Please do comment below.
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