Pay-per-click ads are crucial components of a robust search engine optimization strategy because they produce instant results.
You can accomplish several different objectives with PPC. Some of the most common reasons for using these advertisements include enhancing exposure, finding new leads, attracting more traffic to the website, and increasing sales. However, the one reason that businesses are using PPC is to expand.
Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns are a perfect way to market your business. Unlike other tactics that take a long time to produce results, a successful PPC campaign will get you on the road, leads, and customers very rapidly.
Although PPC is easy to implement, some organizing and preparation are required, so today, you'll learn everything you need to know about putting together an effective campaign.
Let's get straight into it.
Table of Contents
- 1
What is a PPC Campaign?
- 1.1 Step 1: Optimize Your Website First
- 1.2 Step 2: Choose a Bidding Technique
- 1.3 Step 3: Set Up Your Budget
- 1.4 Step 4: Strong Keyword Analysis
- 1.5 Step 5: Customized Your Target Audience
- 1.6 Step 6: Competitor Analysis
- 1.7 Step 7: Organize Your Campaign In Ad Groups
- 1.8 Step 8: Create An Effective Ad
- 1.9 Step 9: Catchy Call-To-Action
- 1.10 Step 10: Choose a Platform For Your PPC Campaign
- 1.11 1) Facebook Ads
- 1.12 2) Twitter Ads
- 1.13 3) Google Ads
- 1.14 Conclusion
What is a PPC Campaign?
Pay-per-click (PPC) is a marketing strategy used by advertisers to pay for clicks created on their advertising. This technique operates on a bidding scheme, with companies selling certain ad space on various Search Engine Results (SERPs) sites. When a company has a PPC ad in place, they pay a charge for each click on their ad.
PPC promotions are putting this tactic to work to create more customer interest, and eventually, sales.
PPC ads are most widely found in search engines. Google, the world's largest PPC network, gives marketers the keywords they like. When anyone searches for those keywords, Google chooses winners from a pool of advertisers. These advertisements would then appear at the top of the results page.
You will need to be strategic to optimize your quality score, a measure made up of your click-through rate, significance, and landing page quality to allow Google to view your ad.
Other big PPC ad providers besides Google include Bing, Facebook, and LinkedIn. For this post, we're going to concentrate on Google Advertising, but a lot of advice applies to all PPC platforms.
Here are the steps to launch a successful PPC campaign.
Step 1: Optimize Your Website First
Before you start any PPC campaign, it is essential that you first step back and resolve the landing pages that will work effectively with your advertisements. This is why it's so crucial when prospects click on a PPC ad because the ad's content has intrigued them, and they want to know more about it.
If the link they click brings them to an irrelevant or generic page on your website, such as your homepage, the prospect is likely to rebound.
Clicking on a PPC ad is an ability to find out more about what the ad was about, which is why it's essential to design custom landing pages that fit the ad's content.
You need to do something for your landing pages to optimize them for success because if buyers click your ad and end up on a page that doesn't load easily, is hard to navigate, or has other technical issues; they'll also bounce.
Step 2: Choose a Bidding Technique
There are many bidding techniques, and choosing the right one will reflect on several factors, including your budget, PPC knowledge, and objectives. One of the first choices you would have to make is between manual and automated bidding.
If you've never done PPC before, you may want to start manual bidding, particularly if you're working on a low budget, because the manual allows you to set a limit on your cost per click.
Automated bidding is on the other end of the continuum, which will minimize the amount of time you may need to invest in running the campaign, but you might end up paying a little more.
When it comes to automated bids, there are many bidding techniques, and you can directly learn more about AdWords from Google. Effectively, you will settle on different tactics based on whether you want sales, exposure, or traffic to be enhanced.
Step 3: Set Up Your Budget
Budget is an essential aspect of a PPC campaign, but it is still possible for you to do this on a limited budget and keep a close eye on how much you invest.
Budgets are significant and in reality, you can still start investing as little as a $25 investment if you're new to PPC, don't have much cash to blow around, and just want to explore the oceans. With this simple formula, you will decide what your budget should be.
Your PPC campaign budget will tell you how much you're going to pay for the clicks you get on your ad placements. You'll set a daily budget on Google Advertising, while sites like Twitter and Facebook will make you pick the percentages you want your payments to be in.
The equation's benefit component includes how much benefit you gain per conversion. It would be best to decide how much of this value you can afford to lose to determine the commission that pays for AdWords.
Step 4: Strong Keyword Analysis
It's time to develop your list of possible keywords and pick the ones you're going to focus on. The higher the keyword search amount, the better. But the more competition there is for this term, the higher the cost per click (CPC) would be.
Keywords Everywhere are recommended as a useful and inexpensive keyword analysis tool. This plugin integrates directly with Google and displays the monthly search amount, the competition score, and the average CPC for each keyword. It also recommends alternatives that you may want to use instead.
To have a good PPC campaign, you need to choose the right keywords to target. These are not just some keywords that apply to your business. They are strategic and built to optimize your PPC ROI.
Efficient keyword research follows three key steps:
Build a list of seeds — these are words from the top of your head. They are also focused on the experience of the clients, past campaigns, and competitors.
Use analysis software to extend or erase this list — software may include keyword planners and software to help you understand what the competition is using.
Refining your list — don't miss this vital move. It's going to cost you.
Keyword research is probably one of the essential PPC campaign areas because it is the whole operation's foundation. Without keywords, the search engine will have no way of knowing when to show your ads. Just as significantly, picking the right keywords will practically ensure your campaign's success, guaranteeing you the most shares, the most click-through, the most traffic, and the most conversions.
The better you select keywords, the more hits you will be receiving. But besides that, you will also be compensated with a better quality score and the resulting lower cost per press. Another essential factor in collecting keywords is negative keywords since they can weed out keywords you want to remove.
Step 5: Customized Your Target Audience
You have the freedom to choose who you want your advertising to reach on any PPC site you want. The "who," in the sense of Google Advertising, involves the position of your audience, the preferences, the applications they use, and, of course, the searches they conduct.
You can also build customized audiences with their own "customized affinities" and "custom goals" to help you target your PPC campaign to the right people.
If you've set your target audience, you'll top it all off with unique search terms whose SERPs you want your ads that appear on (assuming you're making Google Search Ads).
Be mindful of how many keywords you select for each ad. Opposite to what Google Ads would say, the more keywords you want to put an ad, the higher the risk you'll end up in front of the wrong audience.
Step 6: Competitor Analysis
You will need to learn about your competitor's strengths and weaknesses to find keywords that your website can get about traffic and conversions.
Why is competitive analysis so relevant to us? When you see what everyone else on the market is positioning them, it helps you build your specific sales point. Your unique selling point should solve an issue or give a better value than the competition, which should be the subject of your advertising campaign.
The problem/benefit you focus on in a PPC campaign is your target keywords. After competitive analysis, you can settle on the keywords that are the best ways to outdo the competition.
You will find the differences in your competitor's plan with SEMrush and target them with your campaign. Both of these can be achieved in the fields of Domain Analytics and Gap Analysis.
Start advertising competitor analysis. If you are currently running any Google Advertising campaigns, enter your domain in the search bar, and obtain a list of other websites vying for the same keywords as you do. If your domain has not previously run any Google Advertising promotions, you can use a similar website in your industry to get results.
Step 7: Organize Your Campaign In Ad Groups
Assuming you are creating Google Search Ads, you will use the keywords you chose in the 4th step listed above and place them in "advertising classes." If you are creating PPC ads on Twitter, you will use a similar advertisement structure.
In each ad category, you can further configure the search terms connected with that ad to ensure that your ads appear in front of the most interested people in the product. For example, instead of simply choosing two keywords that both sound the same and have a high monthly search volume, you can parse unique words within your search terms and schedule your ad to appear in every search engine query that includes those words.
Step 8: Create An Effective Ad
Once you've established your landing page ready, settled on a budget and offer structure, and carefully picked your keywords, now it's probably the time to get your real ad smashing. One of the keys to remember is to keep it brief and appropriate because there is not much space or time to catch your attention.
Another important thing is to be mindful of a goal and start writing the copy based on that objective. For example, if you want to raise Father's Day sales, your ad copy should show you are having a Father's Day sale. You don't need to be too imaginative, but you need to grab their eye, hold their involvement, and pique their curiosity.
To help catch the interest, consider coming up with a specific value proposition the makes your deal different from everyone else's and explain in one sentence how it would benefit consumers.
Step 9: Catchy Call-To-Action
Call to Action (CTA) is where you tell your potential client what you want them to do. The CTA can be the most crucial component of your ad, and it can make or break its success. So, spend time building a convincing CTA.
While you want people to click on your ad, a Wordstream study found that it's not a good idea to use the word "press" in your CTA. None of the 612 top-performing ads included in the study used this term. "Get" was the most commonly used CTA term, with "buy," "store," and "try" also performing well.
You’re chosen CTA has to be specifically applicable to your bid. Don't be afraid to try out different versions and see which one is the most effective. A minimal change to your CTA can result in a significant improvement in your performance.
The call to action is an essential component of creating an ad that is sufficiently important for its section. There's no point running the ad without a CTA because the CTA tells interested prospects what they should do next. The CTA may be short and sweet, but for example, "buy now" it must be clear, concise, and persuasive.
Step 10: Choose a Platform For Your PPC Campaign
Your main step in running a new PPC campaign is to determine which network to run it. Google Ads might be the most popular PPC campaign among today's marketers, but did you know that social networks like Facebook and Twitter also offer pay-per-click ads?
Here's how each of these ad networks functions.
1) Facebook Ads
Facebook Advertising allows you to put supported posts on news feeds of users that associate with you, the advertiser's unique audience criteria. Using this tool, you can select your target audience, budget, and ad type for your ad, including brand recognition, website traffic, and store visits.
2) Twitter Ads
Twitter Ads function in the same way as Facebook Ads. Using Twitter's PPC ad network, marketers may select between eight different advertising objectives, including app downloads, new fans, tweet contributions, and site traffic, and their target audience for the ads they run. Twitter will then promote your post to the news feeds of users that fit your choices and charge you any time this ad is clicked.
3) Google Ads
Google Advertising enables you to pay for high-quality real estate on Google's different web properties, including Search Engine Results Pages ( SERPs). Your advertisement can take the form of a Display Ad, a Search Ad, an App Ad, or a Video Ad, the latter of which places your video on YouTube.
These PPC campaigns allow you to set your ad budget, configure your audience, and/or allocate to groups of search terms that you want your search results to focus on. Google will charge you any time this search result is clicked.
Conclusion
PPC is a crucial promotional tool in every market strategy. Strategies like SEO, although essential, can take a long time to see results. But if you do that correctly, PPC will start attracting new customers to your company right away.
If you want to succeed, get ready, and strategically execute your PPC campaign. This means knowing your clients, doing rigorous keyword analysis, designing a killer ad and landing page, and monitoring your metrics to see what works.
The job does not stop until you have launched your campaigns and are trying to boost conversions. You need to constantly track your ad group results and add variations to collect information through your campaigns live.
You will always be hurdled even with the tips above. Also, experienced marketers with years of experience in PPC continue to carry out promotions that are not planned.
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