If you are just starting your pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, you need to understand what are the main rules for it and what to do to improve your advertising results.
- Start from the very beginning – your PPC strategy.
First of all you need to answer two questions: what problems do your potential customers have? What problem can your product solve? Then just suggest them the solution – your product.
- If you have no goal – you will have no results.
You need to define goals for the PPC campaign. Your aim is to build a brand – create CPM campaign, you are focused on conversions – run CPA campaigns.
- You need to create a great advertising account.
Always pay attention to the structure of it and optimize it. As we know each account has ad campaigns, ad campaigns contain ad groups, each ad group includes keywords, text, landing page.
- Keywords should be relevant to their ad group.
The most common mistake here is choosing too broad keywords just because it usually has lower bid price. You need to remember about great power of match types and need to use exact, phrase and broad match types. Never forget about negative keywords – they will prevent your ads from being displayed to the wrong audience. There are lots of sites that provide good keyword collector tools that will do everything for you. Best if your chosen tool compares the keywords in the same group against each other which eliminates the irrelevant keywords grouping. That makes the distribution of the keywords more effective while contributing to better website rankings in SERPs.
- Don’t forget bidding for the main company’s name as a keyword.
If you still do not do this – add it to your ad campaign. I am sure you will find you were loosing a lot of traffic and missed clicks. Plus the CPC for those keywords is pretty low. I am sure there are a large majority of us who just overthought using their business’ or companies’ name.
- Ad text should be unique.
It should solve your customers’ problem and should contain right keywords for this group. Use proper words to grab people’s attention and to give them what they need with strong call-to-action phrases.
- Landing pages should match the ad.
They should relate to the users search intent, they should include headlines, photos, text and call-to-actions. Sending people to the homepage you are not solving their problem with your product, you are giving them more problems now – to look for what they need on your site. The rule of thumb regarding that is that every page should have a unique set of its own target keywords – run a decent website audit tool, like SE Ranking (click here for more), to find out if your website is doing great.
- Run campaigns with conversion tracking.
You need to monitor the performance of your PPC campaigns, what happens after a customer clicks on your add, does he order your product and if he buys from you – which keyword, ad group, campaign induces the conversion. Usually it is too hard to do when you run a business, that is why lot of online store’s owners use services like SEranking.com to rely on professional team to do the analysis of your site.
- Create mobile friendly campaigns.
More and more people nowadays come from mobile devices. Make sure that you are using click-to-call extensions, that your mobile ads lead to the responsive site pages, that you use mobile call-to-action where appropriate. Mobile optimized campaigns will help you to increase the conversion rate.
- Always run re-marketing campaigns.
Experiments show that using re-marketing campaign is always profitable and they increase ROI for different types of businesses. If you still do not create re-marketing campaign – you need to know that it may be one of the reasons your PPC sucks, you loose a lot!
- Do not try to win number 1 spot in paid search results.
According to lots of experiments that were made and according to people’s behavior – the best place for your ad is number 3. So do not fight for the first rank, it is not the best strategy at all.
- Higher CTR ≠ Higher landing page conversion.
We like testing and choosing which ads to keep and which to delete. Some of us look only at CTR (click through rate) when deciding whether the ad is good or bad. It is a huge mistake, CTR shows not enough, more powerful is a conversion rate when testing ads.
- You should continuously optimize your ad campaigns.
The ads that have no strong call-to-action phrases will not help you in getting many clicks and conversions. If it takes so long for a landing page to load – it will provide no value to a visitor. Always test and optimize your ad account to improve your conversion rate.
There are just a few life hacks that may help you to save your PPC from fiasco. If you have not crated your ad account yet, the article will be useful for you start it properly. Creating a great campaign structure will help you to target the right audience, to save money (make sure your advertising is not shown to the wrong people or through the wrong channels) and to control your spend and whether your ad groups continue to run, are paused or deleted. Good luck with your ads!