If you’re interested in driving more attention to your business website, you may be interested in the advantages of running pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns. PPC is a type of online marketing in which businesses display ads on search engines and social media platforms. When someone clicks on one of these ads, the business pays a fee to the advertising platform.
PPC can be an effective way to drive traffic to your website and generate leads. However, it’s important to optimize your PPC campaigns to ensure that you’re getting the most out of your investment.
In this article, we will discuss several PPC optimization strategies that will help you increase the effectiveness of your advertising campaign.
Why PPC Optimization Matters for ROI
A pay-per-click ad campaign guarantees you a certain number of eyeballs on your product pages and landing pages. But it does not guarantee that these are the kind of eyeballs that go on to become paying customers.
PPC campaigns are only as successful as their return on investment, and to optimize that return on investment, you must formulate your ad campaigns in such a way that the people most drawn to your ads are also the people most likely to buy your products and services.
This does not happen overnight. Even expert ad agencies spend a lot of time and resources investing in data acquisition and analysis, to ensure that their client’s ads are optimized for lead generation. Here are a few tips on how you can make the most of your PPC campaigns and get the largest return on your investments.
1. Research and Revision
The backbone of any given ad campaign is the target keyword or keywords. Do not let these stay static over time. Trends change, audiences grow, customer interest wanes or moves on, and you need to be on top of it all. That means keeping up with the flow of the internet and keeping an eye on the way the keywords in your niche or industry continue to evolve over time.
Countless free and paid keyword research tools can help you analyze the specific long-tail keywords and phrases that best apply to your paid audience. Remember, you don’t just want high-traffic keywords – you want to attract the kind of people who tend to buy your products to begin with. Set up and review your customer profiles and use them as a basis for your ongoing monthly keyword research. Revise your campaigns to keep up with growing trends and swap out keywords that are becoming ineffective or inefficient.
Negative keywords are just as important. These help you exclude customers who might be looking for something similar to what you offer, but not quite your niche or specialty. It ensures that your ads are focused more on paying customers.
Another important aspect of increasing your keyword research is that it allows you to swap to manual bidding. Ad campaign managers like Google help you automate your bidding, but this isn’t as efficient as choosing your own bids and budget allocation, even if it is easier. If you decide to begin manual bidding, consider working with an experienced digital marketing firm instead. They can ensure that your budget is allocated effectively among high-traffic, low-conversion and low-traffic, high-conversion keywords, without springing the budget.
2. Effective Copywriting is Key
PPC ads have very little real estate. That is why every word counts. A generic header or piece of copy won’t be as effective as something attention-grabbing, intriguing, albeit informative enough to entice a purchase, rather than pushing away potential leads.
When optimizing your ad copy, include the keyword in your headline and description. It sounds like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how often it’s forgotten.
When optimizing your ad copy, include the keyword in your headline and description. It sounds like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how often it’s forgotten.
- Rigoberto Flores, Google Ads Specialist
3. Keep An Eye on Your Core Web Vitals
It’s one thing to entice potential customers to click on your ads. But optimizing your page itself is also part of PPC optimization.
Core Web Vitals entail three major metrics for user engagement and user experience, including page loading speeds, the rate at which your page reacts to user interaction (such as a click), and the rate at which your page’s content shifts in response to different loading times (which may result in unexpected user errors, such as clicking on the wrong button because it shifted in place).
Minimizing loading times, shifting errors, and speeding up the rate at which users can interact with your pages can greatly improve your SEO and the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns.
4. Use HTTPS, Not HTTP
While a minor point, SSL encryption and safety is a plus point in SEO, user safety, and PPC optimization. Invest in an SSL certificate for your website, so your content is safer for users to visit.
5. Make the Most of Ad Extensions on Google
When Google or any other search engine serves you a promoted search result or PPC ad in its first page, chances are that ad will have a bit more meat to it than most other search results. This is due to so-called ad extensions.
These are optional extensions marketers can add to their ad campaigns to provide users with more information to entice a click, and to help filter out unlikely conversions by providing more specific details for potential customers.
For example, you can use your ad extensions to highlight the specific products or services you provide, add a call-us button to your ad, or a chat-with-us-today button. You can even highlight a number of specific products related to the user’s search and display them alongside their respective price tags. Different PPC extensions will net you different results, so be sure to experiment with them (by running them for a few weeks at a time) to determine which extensions bring in the most leads, and the most conversions.
6. Expand Your PPC Campaign
It’s not just Google. While most search engines are dwarfed by the tech giant, there are other PPC ad campaigns you should consider investing in, including Facebook, Microsoft Ads, and Amazon Ads in particular.
While running multiple campaigns at once might be somewhat straining for your budget, note that you can reduce your investment in each individual campaign by improving your keyword efficiency and implementing manual bidding, meaning you have more room to spread the budget across multiple platforms. This might be worth doing if your customer profile tends to do a lot of online shopping on Amazon, or spends a lot of time on Microsoft products.
7. Consider Turning Off Facebook’s Audience Network
The Facebook Audience Network is an ad network that Facebook created for other websites and apps to opt into for more revenue, expanding the reach of Facebook advertisers by spreading their ads onto all participating platforms of the network.
In effect, this means that if you have a PPC campaign on Facebook and have opted into the Facebook Audience Network (by default), your ad will likely show up anywhere from the corner or top row of a free camera app to low-traffic, less-than-trustworthy websites.
This will attract mostly unwanted traffic, traffic you can’t properly test for, and traffic that might just land onto your product by complete accident. In other words, low-quality traffic.
Save yourself the headache by turning this feature off entirely and shutting your ads out of the Facebook Audience Network. This ensures Facebook will only show your ads to potential customers on the platform, most of whom are real people, with a much better chance of being interested in your product.
Conclusion
PPC optimization is a process by which you can improve the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns. There are numerous ways to optimize your PPC campaigns, and by employing some or all of these strategies, you can see a significant increase in conversions.
As competition on the Internet continues to get stiffer and stiffer across all industries, it’s more important than ever to focus on optimizing your PPC campaigns and ensuring that your money is going towards as many paid conversions as possible, rather than useless traffic. Work with us to help ensure that your PPC campaigns are lean and effective.
Great article and valuable information. Thanks.
Thanks for reading, Diana!