Google Pay Per Click (PPC) uses a paid search advertising model, in which users bid on the keywords they want to have trigger their sponsored adverts. Your Pay Per Click (PPC) ads are then displayed alongside search results on Google when someone uses one of your targeted keywords in their search query.
If you are getting website traffic through organic search, it’s still advisable to consider pay per click advertising. PPC ads would normally help your brand to appear at the top or below organic search engine results page (SERP) when a customer searches for products or services that you offer. With PPC advertising, you bid on keywords relevant to your business, showing your targeted ad when people search for that key term. You get a boost, potentially pushing your business to the front page despite your organic search rankings. But you only pay when someone clicks on your ad with ppc advertising.
For an effective PPC Campaign, below are 5 best practices to consider:
- Bidding Strategy
- Landing Page
- Competitor Monitoring
- Keywords Targeting
- Managing Your Campaign
Bidding Strategy
Your bid strategy is how you pay for users to interact with your ads. Google adwords has a functionally that allow you to set your bid automatically and this allows the search engine to manage your cost-per-click (CPC) by setting a maximum daily spend. Automated bid strategies set bids for you based on your business goals. Manual bidding requires you to set your own maximum cost-per-click bids for ad groups thereby giving you give you more control over how traffic is driven to your site.
Enhanced cost-per-click (ECPC) can help you get more conversions from manual bidding. What it does is normally based on your conversion tracking data; ECPC bidding raises your bid for clicks that seem more likely to lead to conversions and lowers your bid for clicks that seem less likely to convert. The good thing about this feature is it helps increase conversions and gets you more value from your budget. It’s key to have a clear objective and a reasonable budget as your bidding strategy is a key element in controlling your ad placement and your budget.
Landing Page Optimisation
A landing page can be any web page that someone lands on after clicking on an online marketing call-to-action. Dedicated landing pages are standalone pages that are designed for a specific marketing campaign most brands normally use.
Both SEO and PPC are designed with a common goal in mind: drive targeted traffic to a particular web page. These web page could either be your website’s main homepage, or an product, service or micro landing page. Optimising a targeted landing page is very important for the success of both your PPC and SEO campaigns with a clear navigation and call to action.
When creating a landing page for PPC, always make sure your pages are focused on relevant keywords and consistent with what the web user has searched for. For example, if you user searcher for buy men shoes, they are expected to land on a web page that has a collection if men shoes and not a homepage or an irrelevant page containing generic or women shoes etc. Its best to have the related keywords in your ad copy, make relevant, engaging and with a clear call to action to drive the needed conversion. Always, ensure the web visitor/user clearly understand the best way to contact your business.
Monitoring Your Competitors
It’s always a good practise to monitor the competition and trends to your market or industry and make adjustments that are competitive. With PPC your can check this to find out if your competitors are getting better placement in SERP than yourself using the Auction insights report tool. Its good practise to look at what keywords your competitors are using. There are good keywords tools such as Keyword Spy and SEM Rush – which help monitor your competitors campaigns and assess how they are impacting your own.
Keywords Targeting
Effective keyword targeting is key to growing traffic and revenue for your online campaigns. When it comes to keywords, the aim shouldn’t be to target everything but rather aim to discover where you have low hanging fruits and then focus to prioritise your efforts. It’s best to identify areas of growth potential, you can transform a website into a traffic machine with high revenue potential.
The effectiveness of your PPC campaigns depends on your choice of keywords, which means you should know who your target customer (audience) are and which words they use to search for your products or services. Bidding on these relevant targeted keywords which are related to your service or product offering. It’s also good practise to rely on historically used keywords but to rely heavily on this as trends and market condition do change in certain sectors because of seasonality’s. There are also keywords tools, like Google’s Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest’s, Keyword Tool, KWFinder – that you can use to do research for keyword ideas.
Managing Your Campaigns
It’s essential to review your ppc campaign on a regular basis and check out how your conversion metrics is performing. In case you do have one set up, you can follow Google’s guide to conversion tracking. It’s good practice to make tweaks and see if they increase your clicks through rates and conversions.
Always keep your keywords up-to-date and relevant as well as Identify any costly keywords that are under-performing and delete them straight away. Keep experimenting by adding new keywords and create smaller ad groups focused on specific product/service types to create more targeted ads and landing pages.
With a clear purpose and well-researched strategy, per pay click marketing can be a powerful tool in your digital marketing strategy — which makes it an investment you can’t afford to neglect. With proper keyword research, analysis and targeting, you can enjoy traffic and revenue boosts, too.
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