PPC advertising is a great way to get your business noticed online. By bidding on keywords that are relevant to your product or service, you can direct potential customers to your site.
You’re essentially paying for ad space on search engines such as Google Adwords or Bing Ads. However, if done incorrectly, it could result in wasted money and little return. So we’ve put together these must-know tips to help you set up an effective PPC campaign.
Define Your Goals
Before you get started, it’s important to define your objectives. Whether you’re looking for increased traffic or sales conversions, you must know exactly what result you’re trying to achieve with each campaign. This will help guide all of the other decisions that go into creating a successful PPC marketing campaign.
Be specific about what you want to achieve. Do you want more leads? More sales? Higher rankings? More brand awareness? Knowing exactly what kind of result will satisfy your business will help determine how much time and money are needed to reach those goals, and whether or not advertising through pay-per-click is even worth it.
Identify Your Target Audience
According to Entrepreneur, it’s essential to know who you are selling to, so you can create marketing campaigns that appeal to them. You can conduct market research to understand more about your target audience and their preferences, needs, and behaviors.
The first step in creating a successful PPC campaign is identifying your target audience. This will help you determine which keywords to use and where to direct your ads.
To do this, start by asking yourself the following questions:
- Who am I trying to reach?
- What are their interests and needs?
Once you’ve answered these questions, look at the data available about your customers’ online habits. For example, if most of your customers are females between 35-45 years old with children who live in big cities like New York or Los Angeles, then targeting those keywords would make sense for your business and it’ll save money.
Research Keywords
Keyword research is a crucial part of your PPC campaign. It’s the foundation upon which you’ll build your ads, ad groups, and landing pages.
There are many keyword tools available online that can help you find relevant keywords for your niche. You can use them to identify high-volume search terms in your industry, then dig deeper into those queries to see if they’re worth targeting with ads in Google AdWords or another paid search platform.
One such tool is Google Keyword Planner. According to Search Engine Journal, Google Keyword planner is a classic favorite. It’s free and because the information on it comes directly from search engines, it’s trustworthy and reliable.
Another popular option is Semrush’s free keyword analyzer tool, which includes more than 23 billion keywords in 140 international databases.
Set Up Ad Groups and Campaigns
Once you have your keywords and ad groups set up, it’s time to start creating campaigns. A campaign is a collection of ads that target the same audience and have similar goals.
For example, if you’re running an e-commerce store and want to increase sales through paid search ads, then one campaign might be “Women’s Clothing.” You could then create another campaign called “Men’s Clothing” so both genders would see relevant products when they search for clothing on Google or Bing.
Each ad group should contain 1-10 keywords with similar topics or themes (for example, Men’s Jeans vs. Women’s Jeans). This makes it easier for WordStream to optimize performance because it only needs to look at one category instead of two separate ones.
It also helps users find what they’re looking for faster by narrowing down results based on their query rather than having too much information thrown at them all at once.
Create Compelling Ad Copy
When it comes to PPC, your ad copy is everything. It’s the first thing people see and one of the biggest factors in determining whether they click on an ad or not. To create a compelling ad copy, you need to:
- Use a headline and description that is relevant to your target audience.
- Use a strong call to action (e.g., Download free report now).
- Make sure your ad copy is consistent with your landing page (e.g., don’t say “free report” in one place and then charge $20 for it).
Monitor and Adjust
Now that you have a PPC campaign set up, it’s time to monitor and adjust. To do that, you need to
- Set up a tracking system. You need to know how your ads are performing so that you can make adjustments over time. Consider using Google Analytics or another third-party tracking tool in addition to AdWords’ built-in reporting features.
- Monitor ROI (return on investment) metrics such as cost per click (CPC), conversion rate, and average order value (AOV).
- Check ad copy and landing page quality regularly by viewing them through the eyes of your customers- Is what they see appealing? Do they understand how to buy? If not, update them accordingly.
Conclusion
It is important to remember that PPC is a long-term strategy, so you need to be patient and keep working on it. You won’t see results right away, but if you stick with it and keep learning from your mistakes, then you’ll be on your way to setting up the perfect PPC campaign.
