What are PPC campaigns?
PPC stands for Pay Per Click. We understand PPC campaigns as publishing ads in search results. Well-known search engines include Google, Seznam, Bing, and many others, depending on the type of country.
Each click on your link in this text ad is charged. You don’t pay to appear in search results, nor for how long your ad is advertised. You only pay by clicking on your link, which is fair. Therefore, the type of PPC ad is among the ads with the highest return on investment (ROI).
Why use PPC campaigns?
Advertising Costs
One of the main reasons why you should think about advertising your products and services in search is the fact that in terms of efficiency and cost, these ads rank as beneficial in contrast to other forms of advertising. You only pay for a click on your link.
Keywords are an important factor in PPC ads. We can apply 3 types of match settings to these keywords. How are?
We will use the keyword “men’s trekking shoes” as an example.
1. Broad Match
A broad match causes your ad to show on a variety of keywords. These keywords match your keyword.
Example: “women’s trekking shoes”
2. Phrase Match
Phrase Match is intended to show phrases that contain your keyword.
Example: “men’s trekking shoes with size 8”
3. Exact Match
An exact match means that your ad will only show if someone uses your exact phrase.
Example: “men’s trekking shoes”
Benefits for advertisers?
- the ad is shown only to those who are interested
- with PPC advertising it is possible to reach many potential customers in a short period of time
- excellent targeting opportunity to reach a specific target group
report on ad results
- pay per click only
- price-performance ratio of campaigns
The most common mistakes. What to watch out for?
Undefined campaign goals
Define goals before you decide on a campaign. Remember that they need to be specific and measurable so that you can easily analyze their performance and then optimize.
Audit
We do not solve the PPC audit and thus we do not observe the current status of your PPC. Consequently, it is not possible to optimize campaigns that would increase the effectiveness of your PPC ads. After the audit, you can quickly optimize campaigns, suggest improvements, appropriate formats, audiences, and target effectively.
Targeting
Why show your ads to the wrong people? Incorrect targeting needs to be corrected quickly. Think about and define your target group. Who is your customer? What is his age, marital status and interests? Identifying your target audience will improve your company’s marketing strategy and boost your conversion rate. Create customer segments. Write down all the properties to define them.
Remember to track goals
It’s not just tracking impressions and clicks on your site, without conversion tracking you won’t be able to accurately evaluate your campaign. Track phone calls, submit forms, and more. Only then will you be able to understand the results of the campaign.
Irrelevant landing pages
There is nothing worse than when a customer clicks on a link but can’t find what he’s looking for. Landing pages should be relevant to the text you use in your ads. In addition, if visitors do not find what they are looking for, the Quality Score will decrease. This will cause your ads to show less often, be more expensive, and fall in position.
Promoting the same ad for a long time
Update your content frequently to engage your audience. Because if the same ad is promoted for too long, the results will start to decline.
You use all keywords
What is better? A group of keywords or a thousand keywords? Of a large number of keywords, less than half may not receive traffic or conversions. Focus on the keywords that lead to your purchase, especially if you have a limited budget for creating campaigns.
The web is important
Take a look at your website. Does it look good and conversions coming? Test its speed and optimize it. Be aware that users use multiple devices (mobile phones, tablets, laptops) to browse during the day. Mobile responsiveness is the number one thing to focus on. If you have a good PPC campaign but a bad website, it is likely that you will not get favorable results.
Low budget
You can’t expect miracles unless you set a sufficient budget. Of course, you should evaluate whether this form of promotion is worthwhile, especially if you focus on selling low-value products.
If you’ve judged this form to be right for you, make no mistake about not allocating a reasonable budget to this marketing activity. With a low budget, your campaigns may not show and may not accrue enough clicks and conversions.
Landing page with multiple product categories
Let’s not burden our potential customers by the fact that the landing page contains all products or products that do not belong to the category. For example, if your ad contains a children’s shoe product, your landing page should not include women’s shoes.
Visitors do not have time to search among the wide range of products in your offer. You know it for yourself. What would you do in this situation on the customer’s side? I would find another page where I don’t have to look for a needle in a haystack.
Phone number in PPC advertising
Have you ever decided on the basis of a telephone contact which product to buy? I think most don’t. Use this space to attract attention or mention the reasons why you should buy the product.
Recommendations
It is necessary to take care of them and not just leave them but to optimize and monitor the results.
Make sure your ads are relevant to your business because if you show to people who aren’t interested in your offer, the results won’t be acceptable.
If your PPC campaigns are set up correctly, they can be a good addition to your SEO strategy.
Less is sometimes more. This is sometimes true of PPC campaigns and their channels. It’s better to manage one campaign than the 5 that don’t work properly.
Use more variations of your ads. Find out which types of ads are more appealing to your potential customers. Use A / B testing for this.
Don’t turn off campaigns too soon. Take the time to collect data to help you optimize your campaigns. You will learn what works and with the next campaign, you will use all the knowledge.
Don’t focus on your brand in the lyrics. It may not be known to potential customers, such as Coca Cola. Highlight your benefits that might be of interest to your target audience.
Don’t forget your running campaigns. constantly monitor and improve them. Based on this, it’s easy to see which ad groups to exclude.
Include long tails in your keywords. These are keywords that have a long-phrase. They are affordable and safe for you. You don’t have to make a high number of visits to generate a profit.
Author Bio:
Silvia Sýkorová – Consultant for online business and marketing. Account manager for BlueWinston – Automated product tool for Google Ads.