Despite the rise of programmatic advertising and display ads, Google’s Adwords still rules the roost. Google accounts for 80% of search ad revenue in the US. Therefore, simply focusing only on Google’s PPC campaigns could fetch significant returns. But you must have a strategy to derive the maximum returns for that. It is simple enough to enroll for Adwords campaigns and run its course, but there is relatively more to it.
If you wish to get the best returns, it is wise to leave it to PPC services Company to handle your optimal outcomes. It would help if you aimed for an average conversion rate of 3.75% for search ads. It is worth following these tips that will help you to maximize returns on PPC campaigns.
Defining The Goal
It helps to be precise and explicit about the intended goal. You can choose from marketing, branding, raising awareness, driving traffic, generating leads, or achieving conversions. Decide on one at a time and select keywords and appropriate landing page links on your website.
Choosing The Right Keywords And Landing Page Link
While ad copy is important and plays a decisive role, keywords are even more so. You could be tempted to pick 10 to 20 keywords. However, the Digital Marketing Institute finds that a PPC campaign generates sales from only 12% of its keywords. Therefore:
- Pick keywords relevant to the product and not related topics based on keyword search and analysis using Google’s tools. If this is beyond you, then leave it to PPC services Company to optimize the right keyword. If you are selling, for instance, a coffee maker, then use this term in the keywords, not something about making coffee. You want to target people who are looking to buy a coffee maker.
- Link keyword with a specific landing page link in the ad. This page should feature the coffee maker.
- Complement it with engaging text to convince searchers to click through to the landing page.
This is not a cut and dried process but an agile one. Your PPC Services Company will track performance and will use another keyword or change the text copy or do both as may be necessary as you go along.
You will find it advantageous to fine-tune copy and keywords to align with Google’s matching algorithms. These include an exact match in which searcher;
- Uses specific keyword used in your ad;
- Phrase match in which keywords must appear in the same order as the search query;
- Broad match in which Google determines relevant search queries matching keywords;
- Broad match in which Google relies on your choice of phrase
- The order that must be present in search queries for your ad to display
Another wrinkle here is that you can choose dynamic keyword insertion to improve the click-through rate. Here again, it gets a bit complex. It is best to leave it to PPC Service Company to handle PPC campaigns.
Geotargeting, Audience Targeting & Timing
Taking it a step further, reduce your PPC costs and increase conversions and traffic by using geotargeting features coupled with timing for when your ad should be displayed. This varies depending on your service and product.
If, for example, you are running a brick-and-mortar store, then, obviously, you will want to target people in your locality. If you are making a machine in China and wish to target buyers in the USA and Europe. You will use both geotargeting and timing. So that your ad gets maximum views at the right time and evokes responses that lead to conversions.
You can and should fine-tune the choice of a keyword and ad copy for specific markets to address geotargeting, audience targeting, and timing. You could go a step further and create mobile-only ads, call-only ads, and mobile text ads. Over 45% of people use mobiles to search for products.
All these factors also influence ad copy, so you will switch back and forth between ads, keywords, and geo-targeting strategies to achieve the right mix through constant monitoring of ad behavior.
Bid strategy
Yet another way to optimize ROI on PPC ad spends is to look at the bidding system and choose the right one for your budget. Facebook, Twitter, and other search engines have their systems. Google Ad offers options by way of cost per click, cost per thousand viewable impressions, cost per acquisition, and cost per view bidding (mainly intended for video ads).
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A starting point is to choose the cost-per-click option and blend it into your geolocation, timing, and keyword strategies for best results. You can set it to manual cost per click so that you can choose bids related to ad groups or keywords.
Rotate ads
By now, it is amply clear that you will need to develop more than one ad and adopt more than one bid strategy. Leave it to the PPC Service Company to create a few ads that can then be rotated based on parameters such as clicks and conversions and rotate between the two.
Fluid Adjustments On The Go
PPC campaigns are not something you design, develop, deploy and forget. Constant daily monitoring is a must to know performance based on various metrics, a few of which have been outlined above. You will observe that some keywords get you good results, and you can focus more on these.
You will find that displaying ads in certain locations and at certain times proves more beneficial. So you may wish to fine-tune these ads while weeding out keywords and advertisements that do not fetch appreciable returns. This is a tall order, and it is best to engage a PPC Services Company to take care of your PPC campaign.
Consider that PPC is not just restricted to Google; you will also need a similar category of ads on Twitter, Facebook, other social media, and other search engines. Again, since money and ROIs are involved, you will find it worthwhile to pay a PPC Service Company to handle it all to ensure you get maximum returns.