One of the most successful ways marketers can reach potential customers online is through pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. A recent survey discovered that as many as 45% of small business currently utilize PPC in their marketing plans.
And this doesn’t even cover the large businesses and corporations who have tapped into this rich marketing tool. If it isn’t already, PPC optimization should be a top priority for your business as it can provide an on-going stream of targeted leads for your business.
But, what is PPC Marketing?
PPC Marketing, and specifically Google Adwords PPC, is a way of utilizing search engines to advertise to people searching for your products and services on the internet. Pay-per-click, sometimes called cost-per-click, is an internet advertising model that helps direct customers to a certain website or web page.
When a PPC ad is clicked on, the visitor is taken to a specific web page providing further information about the product or service they are interested in. You’ve probably seen sidebars and banners with advertisements on various websites, and so you’ve already seen PPC in action.
In this article, we’ll show you ten simple but effective ways to optimize your PPC campaigns to generate traffic and secure new revenue.
10 Insider Tips for PPC Optimization
To attract new customers, you need to meet them where they’re at, which is the internet. To funnel them to your website, you’ll need to take on the best internet marketing tactics to drive visitors towards sales.
To help, here are a few ways you can improve your PPC campaign and up your marketing game:
1. Learn as Much as Possible About Your Audience
You don’t need to hire a team of people to do hands-on research of your target demographic. However, you should have a firm grasp on what kind of message and visual designs work best for that market.
Do your market research and look up insightful ways to learn more about your audience’s preferences. Beyond obvious demographical info (like age and gender), you should look into the psychological aspects that will help you think like them.
2. Research the Best Keywords
To help you grab as much online attention as you can, and to appeal to your target market, you should implement specific keywords in your marketing. Keywords and phrases will act like a spark in your potential customer’s mind.
To find out which of these words and phrases appeal most to your audience, you need to conduct keyword research available through online tools. Find out what phrases your ideal customer is searching for online.
Translate your market research into quality keywords and monitor their performance rates.
3. Set Up Conversion Tracking
To optimize your results, you’ll need to understand how pages are working in real time. Conversion tracking is your answer.
Measuring the success of a PPC campaign will help you make adjustments and fine-tune your marketing to your audience. Conversion tracking can be set up on a website so all traffic coming in from ads can be monitored and evaluated.
4. Build an Appropriate Landing Page
When a visitor is redirected to your website after clicking on an ad, the page they are shown, known as a landing page, should deliver on what it advertised. Be informative with your landing page and give visitors all the right details about the exact product they clicked on.
A common mistake marketers make is to link their PPC campaign to their home page. Something that will immediately get things off on the wrong foot is if the material on the landing page doesn’t reflect the ad. If visitors have to dig through information or scroll endlessly to find the product, they probably won’t.
5. Refine Your Ad’s Image
Images are a powerful way to attract the eye and put a familiar perspective on an ad. Just as your landing page should reflect the product, the images used in your ad should be appropriate to your message. This is not as important with traditional Google Search advertising, but plays a huge role on other advertising platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.
Make sure your image is high quality and sends a message that enhances your ad. Refine it until you’ve got the perfect image and then make similar variations.
6. Implement SEO Tactics to Content
Keywords and phrases are the heart and soul of SEO, helping align searches with related content. However, there are also other tools like meta descriptions and headings that can boost efforts.
Make sure to employ the best SEO tactics on each of your landing pages to maximize your online traffic.
7. Employ Negative Keywords
Though negative keywords sound like a huge barrier to sales, they can actually improve your views by limiting the reach of your content.
By inputting specific words or phrases as negative keywords, you ensure visitors reaching your site are actually looking for what you have to offer. These negative keywords prevent your ad from showing when people use words not related to your business in their queries.
By weeding out the searches that don’t pertain to your business, you essentially increase the chances of sales.
8. Pause Poorly Performing Keywords
You’ll need to monitor your pages to see how they perform over time and which keywords work the best in your ads. If keywords have a low search volume or have a low score, consider pausing them.
Sometimes keywords are either too vague or too specific, but it’s hard to tell until enough data has come back. Once you see results after testing for a few days, you can start looking to adjust keywords.
9. Optimize for Mobile
Mobile is where people go for their social media, their quick questions, and their shopping these days. To meet people where they’re at, you’ll need to ensure your content is optimized for mobile viewing.
You need to make sure your ads are optimized for mobile devices in addition to having a mobile-friendly landing page. Any time you make a change to either one of those things, make sure to thoroughly test your changes on a laptop, phone and tablet!
10. Create Something New and Test It
Just when you think your ad is as good as it can get, choose to make something even better. To stay ahead of the game and on top of sales, you’ll need to push out new landing pages, catchy ad headlines and descriptions, while conducting A/B tests to ensure optimal performance.
As we stated above, optimizing your ads and their subsequent landing pages should be a top priority from now until people stop clicking on online ads.
Google Adwords Management
Need more help with PPC optimization or advertising? Need professional SEO or PPC assistance to boost your campaign?
Then you need to hire a PPC Management Company. At nuBranch Media, our PPC experts know how to leverage all the right resources to drive the most traffic to your campaigns. Contact us today to see how we can help you strategize your digital advertising campaigns for optimal success!