10 Essential Tips for an Effective PPC Campaign

PPC marketing is an effective form of online advertising. It involves placing ads on an ad network to generate leads and pay the network for every click you get on the ad. In other words, PPC allows advertisers to attract targeted and qualified traffic to a website. The best part is that it’s scalable and consistent.

You can get increased traffic, leads, customers, and revenue with a good pay-per-click campaign. Even so, achieving PPC success can be complicated at times. A good PPC campaign involves a combination of strategy and tools. Read along to learn how to run an effective PPC campaign.

Start With Defining Your Goals

Like any other marketing campaign, you need a goal for PPC marketing. After all, without a definitive goal, it is impossible to set the right processes and measure your results.

Your PPC campaigns should be based on your goals. Without well-defined goals, you won’t have a roadmap to follow for a successful PPC campaign. These goals can vary depending on your business—they can involve attracting more leads, increasing subscriptions, getting more downloads or sales, and much more.

The catch is to define your goals and optimize your PPC process to achieve them. Remember to measure your campaigns to see whether you are achieving the required results and determine where you need to change for better results.

Select a PPC Campaign Platform

Now that you know your goals, the next step is to choose the right platform to run your PPC ad. Google Ads remain popular among many marketers, though social networks like Twitter and Facebook are great PPC advertisements platforms as well.

With Google Ads, you can pay for valuable real estate, including search engine results pages (SERPs). Google ads can take different forms, including a Search Ad, Display Ad, Video Ad, or App Ad.

On the other hand, Facebook Ads involve placing “sponsored” posts on the news feeds of users that meet the characteristics of your target audience. Facebook will then charge you anytime a user clicks your ad.

Set a PPC Budget

Setting your budget limit is a great PPC campaign tip. Most startups will usually reach this limit quickly. As such, you must ensure that you only spend your marketing budget on the most effective products or services.

Most businesses (whether small or big) make the mistake of focusing their campaigns on all their services instead of promoting only the most profitable services or products. Ask your marketing and accounting teams to identify the most profitable products or services for your PPC campaigns.

Select High-Performance Keywords

The need to choose the right keywords for your PPC campaign cannot be overstated. As such, you need to select high-performance keywords for your PPC campaign and work on them.

Take your time to check your keyword’s performance reports to see which keywords perform better and can generate more revenue. Ideally, these are keywords that help generate more leads.

Choosing the keywords that perform better is only one part. You need to do away with keywords with poor performance. These keywords have little-to-no impact on getting traffic and conversions. Spending your PPC budget on these keywords is a waste of time and advertising spend. As such, it makes a lot of sense to pause them.

Eliminate Negative Keywords

Next is to make a list of negative keywords to avoid wasting your ad spend. The idea is to look for keywords that don’t bring more traffic or drive conversions.

Identifying negative keywords is an excellent way to control your ad spend and optimize the performance of your PPC campaigns. Usually, negative keywords are similar to your target keyword but are not useful to your campaign. For example, if you’re advertising SEO services, the phrase “keyword research” may be appropriate but not the phrase “tools” since you offer SEO services and not tools.

Using inappropriate phrases in your PPC campaigns will only attract the wrong people, which will increase your bounce rate. When your PPC ad is inappropriate, you will have fewer conversions (if any), and your cost per click (CPC) will be much higher.

Take your time to identify negative keywords and focus more on search queries that help drive relevant traffic.

Use Conversion Tracking

Another great PPC campaign tip is to enable a conversion tracker to monitor your campaign. Ideally, this involves inserting a piece of code into your HTML to track specific actions on your web pages.

For example, you can set up a conversion tracker on checkout pages to help determine which ads have the most conversions. This can help track shares, subscriptions, click-to-calls to action, and much more.

You can also use a conversion tracker to monitor calls from ads and landing pages to help measure the effectiveness of different ad campaigns.

Do Not Ignore Ad Extensions

Ad extensions offer an excellent way to provide additional information about your products or services. It helps improve your visibility and the overall Return on Investment (ROI). Some of the popular ad extensions to help improve your PPC campaign effectiveness include:

• Location extensions to display your location, contact information, and map directions to your business
• Sitelinks extensions to help your customers reach their destination on your website hassle-free
• Call extensions to help visitors call you easily
• Review extensions to provide social proof

These extensions help test new CTAs and offer additional options to interact with your ads and improve conversions.

Forget About Running Ads on Weekends

It may not be the best option to run ads when people are in a holiday mood. This is especially the case if you run a B2B business. Internet users are also less active on weekends, so it may make sense to decrease ad spending during this time.

Consider Audience Demographics and Device Usability

Before you run your PPC campaigns, make sure you understand your target demographics and the devices they use in their search. Does your audience include an older demographic that uses desktops or a younger generation that relies on mobile devices?

Adjusting your device bids will help maximize CTR and improve conversions.

A/B Test Your PPC Elements

Last but not least, A/B test your PPC campaigns. A/B testing is crucial for PPC campaigns, as it helps make your ad more relevant. The elements you can test on your PPC Ads include the headline, keywords, description, Ad Extensions, and link.

You can also test your landing pages by choosing any of these elements:

• Headline
• Design
• Benefits and features
• Images
• CTA

Typically, you should A/B test your keywords, bids, and ad groups regularly because the PPC space is constantly changing. This will help identify which phrases and ad copy have the most conversions. The catch is to ensure that you test only a single element at a time to determine which PPC elements are most effective.

Bottom Line

That’s it. The above tips will help run an effective PPC campaign. When you identify your goal and identify your PPC strategy, you’ll increase your chances of driving traffic and increasing conversions. Also, keep testing your ad copy to determine what works best and what areas need improvements.