Even with the increased popularity of social media and AI platforms, search engines and search marketing remain the highest converting and most profitable digital marketing channels, with pay-per-click (PPC) playing a significant role.
The ability of PPC marketing to quickly drive targeted users to a website is unmatched. Whether you are looking to boost traffic or sell a specific product or service quickly, PPC ads are a great way of delivering fast results.
However, with increased competition in the search marketing space, PPC costs have risen sharply. This means running a standard PPC campaign is no longer suitable. Instead, businesses need to utilise a range of data, insights and techniques to not only ensure their ads target the correct users, but that their PPC ad spend doesn’t spiral out of control.
To help businesses maximise their PPC campaigns’ performance and generate a good ROI on their ad spend, we have included a few key PPC techniques below that will help companies to fine-tune their PPC campaigns to get maximum value from them.
Audience Targeting & Segmentation
“If you don’t know where you’re going, how are you meant to get there?” as the famous quote says, is as applicable to PPC campaigns as anything else. If you don’t know who your target customers are, how are you meant to target them?
Audience targeting is the very foundation on which all PPC campaigns are built. In the early days of PPC marketing, knowing what keywords and search terms users would use to find your website was all you needed. These days, however, that is not enough. The good news is that PPC platforms like Google Ads and Microsoft Bing Ads have advanced tools and data insights to help you research and target your ideal customers.
How To Optimise:
- External Data & Insights: Third-party data and insight tools like Google Analytics, your own internal CRM, email lists, etc, are a great way to build and segment specific types of users and potential customers
- Intent: Understanding the intent of your target users is key. If a user is searching for ‘best iPhone deals’, then they have much higher conversion intent compared to a user who is searching for ‘how to preserve iPhone battery life’
- Demographics: Understanding your target user demographics is essential. Is your product or service targeted to young or older users? Are your target users located in a specific location? These are the demographic insights you can use to target your PPC campaigns better
- Personas: By collating all available data and insights, you can create an ideal ‘customer persona’. This target customer persona will then enable you to refine your targeting based on their unique needs
Why It’s Important:
When you correctly target your ideal users and potential customers, you massively reduce wasted spend, improve conversion rates and generate a much better ROI on your PPC ad spend. This is essential if you plan to include PPC campaigns as part of your long-term digital marketing strategy.
AI & Smart Bidding
The days of creating and managing PPC campaigns manually are coming to an end. These days, leading PPC platforms like Google Ads and Bing Ads are increasingly using automation and AI-driven ‘smart bidding’ to increase the success of their platforms further.
The good news is that this shift to automation and AI-driven smart bidding makes it easier for business owners with little or no PPC experience to create and manage a successful PPC campaign. That said, it’s essential to grasp the fundamentals of AI and smart-driven bidding.
How To Optimise:
- CPA/ROAS: Cost per acquisition (CPA) and return on ad spend (ROAS) metrics enable PPC platforms to optimise your spend budget by targeting ads to users with higher conversion potential. By using these metrics instead of cost per click (CPC), PPC platforms aren’t limited by max cost per click limits
- Machine Learning: When AI and smart bidding are activated, the PPC platforms start to ‘learn’ your campaign and target users, and this can take time. Instead of constantly changing your PPC campaigns, it’s advisable to allow PPC platforms a minimum of 7 days to ‘re-learn’ after your changes for them to re-optimise your campaigns successfully. In most cases, 10+ days is more than sufficient
- Oversight: Although PPC platforms can automate a lot of work needed for a successful PPC campaign, it is still advisable to have an element of manual oversight. This will enable you to pause ads and adjust budgets, etc, if you spot any worrisome trends
- Max Campaigns: PPC platforms like Google Ads have facilities called ‘performance max’ which allow the PPC platform to create and display ads across all their products, such as YouTube, Maps, Gmail, etc
Why It’s Important:
By allowing PPC platforms to implement their advanced AI and smart bidding systems, you not only eliminate much of the guesswork and reduce mistakes but also enable them to leverage their vast data and user insights to target users with higher conversion potential better, thereby compelling them to visit your website.
Ad Copy & A/B Testing
Regardless of how accurate and laser-focused your user targeting is, if your adverts fail to appeal to your target users or compel them to take action, you are effectively pouring money down the drain. Your ad copy needs to be personalised, engaging and in a tone they can relate to.
A great way to achieve the above is by testing, testing and more testing. By A/B testing different ad variations, you can identify the most effective ad combinations and focus your ad spend on these high-converting ads for maximum ROI.
How To Optimise:
- Responsive Search Ads: Responsive search ads (RSA) are a great way to test different headings, descriptions, CTA’s and USP’s in real time so you can identify the best converting ad
- Triggers: If possible, try to include ‘triggers’ that compel users to act, for example ‘20% off today’ and ‘5-star reviews’ etc
Impact: Make sure your headline and descriptions are sharp and to the point. You only have a few characters per row to play with, so make them count - Correlation: Even if you have the best, compelling ads, if your landing page doesn’t match up with your ad copy, then users will exit your website. Never use outlandish or misleading claims in your ads, and always make sure the user can clearly see they are on the correct landing page when they click through from the ad
Why It’s Important:
PPC ads occupy a small portion of the top of the search results page, often allowing only three adverts at any one time, making competition for these ad slots fierce. When you have compelling ads with high impact, you stand out amongst the crowd.
Also, when your ads are performing to the maximum potential, the PPC platforms reward you by charging you a cheaper rate (cost per click) for each ad, further improving ROI by maximising your PPC spend.
Landing Pages
They say poor marketing can be the downfall of a business, but a poor product will be the death knell of it, and it’s the same with landing pages on a website. If your landing pages fail to excite, engage, or compel users to take action, no amount of PPC marketing will be able to make your business a success.
When you have landing pages that offer a great user experience and inform users of your service or products’ key benefits, USPs, as well as providing clear call to actions, you massively increase your conversion potential. When you have finely tuned and targeted ads directing users to optimised landing pages, your conversions will go through the roof.
How To Optimise:
- Clean Design: Your landing pages should utilise clean design as much as possible. Clunky visuals, text overload and too much functionality can slow down page load speed and put users off
- Clear CTAs: If your landing pages lack clear CTAs, you can’t expect users to take action. ‘Book Now’, ‘Make Enquiry’ and ‘Add To Cart’ type CTAs are a great way to encourage users to take action
- Trust Signals: Users today are savvier than you think. They approach every new website/brand with a degree of suspicion. This is why it’s essential to include trust signals such as customer reviews, accreditations and industry awards to help establish trust in your users’ minds
- A/B Testing: Similar to your PPC ads, A/B testing different elements on your landing pages can help determine which combination increases conversions. Headings, sub-headings, visuals and CTAs can all be A/B tested for maximum conversion performance
Why It’s Important:
The goal is to design and optimise your landing pages so that they appeal to as many of your targeted users as possible. When you optimise your landing pages, you not only provide a much better user experience (key for conversions) but you also generate a positive brand experience too ( key for repeat customers).
If you can increase your landing page conversion rate by a few % points, then that could have a significant impact on improving your PPC ad spend ROI.
Negative Keywords & Exclusions
William Lever, one of the founders of Lever Brothers (now Unilever) corporation, famously said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is, I don’t know which half”. Even though this quote is over 100 years old, it couldn’t be truer today when it comes to PPC marketing.
One of, if not the most common way PPC markets waste spend budget is by targeting keywords that don’t convert or add any value whatsoever. In the PPC industry, we call these ‘negative keywords’.
How To Optimise:
- Relevance: Analyse the keywords and search terms people use to find your website through paid ads. If they are not relevant, then add them to your negative keyword list
- Intent: If you identify keywords that have low conversion intent, add them to your negative keyword list
- Location: If users are using location keywords that are outside your target locations, then add these keywords to your negative keyword list
Why It’s Important:
If you can quickly identify negative keywords and add them to an exclusion list in your Ads account, you will significantly reduce spend wastage. More importantly, this ensures your spend budget is targeted only on keywords and keyphrases that drive value and conversions for your website.
Ad Extensions & Callouts
All of the major paid ad platforms allow you to add additional information to your ads on top of the standard ad headlines and descriptions. When you include these extra extensions and callouts, they make your ads more visible and allow you to communicate additional information that helps make your ads more compelling to users.
How To Optimise:
- Sitelinks: Sitelinks offer users an additional way to explore different parts of your website from a single ad. Whether it may be your ‘offers’ page or ‘contact us’ page, sitelinks allow users to visit the landing page that is more suited to their individual needs
- Callouts: Callouts are a great way to include specific CTAs that stand out and compel users to click your adverts
Images: When you include images in your extensions, your ads stand out much more, attracting interest from users
Why It’s Important:
When you utilise ad extensions and callouts, you expand the visibility and attractiveness of your ads beyond the basic format of just ad headlines and descriptions. This means you take up more screen space, can provide more context, include offers and call-to-actions, and make your adverts more visually appealing compared to your competitors.
Winning The PPC Battle
If your business is serious about succeeding in the hyper-competitive nature of search engines, then it’s essential you deploy a well-structured and executed PPC strategy that maximises ROI.
Whether you want to utilise PPC campaigns as a long-term driver of traffic or for short-term needs such as boosting visibility of limited offers and deals, it is vitally important that your PPC campaigns are optimised correctly, or you will end up spending a fortune for little or no return.
By utilising the techniques we have outlined above, you will automatically maximise ROI on your ad spend while gaining an advantage over your competitors.
Ready To Maximise Your PPC Performance?
If you have PPC campaigns already set up, or are a complete beginner to PPC marketing and would like specialist support, here at Greyhound, we have the knowledge and expertise to help you achieve your PPC goals.
Whether you are a small local business targeting local customers or an international eCommerce brand targeting 1000’s of users per day, we have the strategies and techniques that will deliver real results.
Get in touch with our friendly specialist PPC team to see how we can help you generate the best possible ROI on your PPC spend.
