PPC Advertising — 7 Advanced Ways To Take It To The Next Level
Tags: Ppc Advertising, PPC Marketing, Ppc Agency

Introduction

We’re sure you too want to improve the performance of your PPC advertising campaigns. As simple as it may seem, in order for PPC advertising to work really well, provide you a continuous supply of qualified leads, and minimize wasted ad spend, you need to master its nuances.

Our PPC experts have put together an e-book detailing 7 awesome ways to help you take your PPC advertising to the next level. This blog post contains excerpts from the e-book. Learn and incorporate these into your paid search campaigns and see the difference.

You can also request for your free copy of the e-book here.

1. Master The Basics

This might seem like a contradictory start to a topic titled “advanced ways…”, but given that it’s so difficult to master all the basics of PPC advertising, this makes it an advanced accomplishment on its own.

Setting up a PPC campaign is easy enough, but consistently maintaining them at a high level is much harder. And only rarely does it happen that campaigns are amazingly managed, generating a high ROI, and are fully integrated with the overall digital marketing strategy of the business.

However, when that does happen, it too begins with the basics.

Here are some pay-per-click advertising basics that if you master, you would be on your way to PPC glory.

Sparkling Ad Copy

PPC ad copy if often underrated and overlooked. The ad copy is what you first want people to read and engage with, so wouldn’t it be appropriate to spend a fair bit of time and effort in making sure that it is creative and compelling? This is as basic as it gets, but it’s not easy to do, and mastering it will reap rich dividends.

A/B Test Ads

One of the ways in which to enhance your PPC ads performance is to experiment and split test the ads you create. Create 2 or more ads for the same page/ offer, set up a brief split test, and then proceed with the ad that gives better results.

Use Better Landing Pages

You should be using well-conceived landing pages for your ads. But maybe your landing pages could be better. You can use A/B testing for your landing pages too and thus improve the Quality Score for your PPC ad campaigns.

Target Your Ads

The more targeted your ads are, the better results you will get. This means that your keywords, ad copy, and landing page content must work in complete unison.

2. Use PPC To Inform And Improve SEO

You may have heard agencies recommend either PPC or SEO while denouncing the other. Agencies recommending PPC only might claim that SEO doesn’t work or takes too long to deliver results, while those in favour of SEO might insist that PPC does not provide return on investment.

The truth is that both SEO and PPC are great digital marketing channels, and like most aspects of digital marketing, what is right for your business will depend on many factors. The ability to adapt to the rapidly shifting digital marketing landscape and recognize the combinations of strategies and tactics that deliver the best results is the most important component of great digital marketing campaigns.

If you develop a narrow focus, your company will fall behind your more adaptive competitors.

For most businesses, the best course of action is to use PPC and SEO in tandem, which makes sense because they both focus on getting your business found via search engines. Let’s take an example, where you try a PPC campaign with 4 keywords — A, B, C, and D, with A being the most expensive term. After a month, the results show that even though A is the most expensive keyword, C is the keyword that gave you most conversions. Now throw in some keyword research to substantiate your findings, but because the keyword C is doing well in your PPC campaigns, it’s likely that C is a keyword for you to focus on with your SEO efforts.

Another reason why both PPC and SEO work well together is that studies have shown when a PPC ad and an organic result appear on the same search engine results page (SERP), overall CTR increases for the PPC ad. This means that not only can you use PPC data to inform and improve your SEO results, you can also use both tactics in tandem to generate more clicks and get a higher conversion rate — ultimately leading to more sales.

3. Use PPC To Accomplish More Than One Goal

PPC is mainly associated with conversions and when most people hear the word “conversion”, they think of money — i.e. selling a product or service. But as marketers know, conversion is a process and our job is to lead potential customers from the beginning of that process to the end. PPC shouldn’t be used just to seal the deal, it should be used throughout the conversion process to achieve various goals.

These days people search for information before they make a purchase. To help them decide through the conversion process, here are a few things you can do:

Brand Awareness

It probably goes against your pre-conceived notions of PPC, but brand awareness PPC campaigns are not geared towards directly selling a product or service. As the name suggests, the goal is to make as many people as possible aware of your brand. Techniques for branding campaigns can be as straightforward as bidding on your own brand name to to take over the SERP real estate, or as creative as the Snickers campaign that bid on common search misspellings as keywords and offered their chocolate bar as a solution.

Content and Information

For any branded content, your goal should be to provide value and information to your potential customers. We know that one of the SEO goals for content is to rank highly for certain keywords so that searchers can find your informative post organically. Why can’t PPC help with this goal too? The answer: it can! All you have to do is craft an ad that is highly relevant to your blog post topic, target it towards consumers who are searching for information on your blog topic and keyword, and launch the campaign. In this case, PPC is just a quicker way to get eyes on your content, which could potentially increase social shares, and even help with your SEO. It’s a win-win!

Special Offers

Every potential customer is different, so while a 10% discount might appeal to one, a free whitepaper might appeal to another. To cover your bases, make sure you provide various offers through your PPC ads, especially when the focus is on consumers who are nearing their purchase decision.

4. Reach New Audiences And Markets

One of the great things about PPC is its versatility. More specifically, it’s the immediacy of the versatility that allows you to be really creative and reach new audiences and markets almost as soon as you think of a campaign idea. And since campaigns are effective from the moment you launch them, you can theoretically monitor your campaign for just a few days and figure out whether it’s delivering results.

For example, let’s say you want to target an audience that isn’t quite your normal audience but does have some crossover areas of interest with your products and services. You could run a campaign using those crossover keywords just to see if members of these secondary audiences have an interest in clicking through to information about your brand.

Here are a few ideas you can run ads in response to:

Online trends

Seasonal events

Peak online shopping periods

5. Target Customers Anywhere And Everywhere

PPC gives you the opportunity to target your customers anywhere and everywhere they are online. In addition to reaching new audiences with experimentally targeted campaigns, PPC allows you to target potential customers using display ads and remarketing. This enables you to create special offers and seasonal campaigns to serve to previous conversions or visitors who have shown an interest in your brand.

6. Learn More About Your Competitors Than You Think You Can

There are numerous ways to discover the digital tactics and strategies being employed by your closest competitors. There are many opportunities to spy on the PPC activity of your competitors as well.

Using tools such as SpyFu, here are a few ways you can scrape information from the campaigns of your closest competitors:

Analyze keyword selection

Analyze bid levels

Monitor ad updates

Monitor special offers

The information you unearth can help you determine which of your competitors are hurting your market share and allow you to modify your campaigns to once again get ahead of them.

7. Measure And Improve Your Conversion Rate

With the sheer amount of data that comes from running your PPC campaign, there’s no excuse for not measuring and continuously trying to improve your conversion rates.

At the most basic level, it’s easy to determine which keywords are driving the most conversions. In the same way that highly converting terms make for good SEO targets, they should also continue as terms for bidding via PPC. By the same logic, you may want to swap lower converting keywords for new ones that might do a better job.

Another way to improve your conversion rates is by quickly responding to leads. Studies have shown that leads which are responded to within 5 minutes have 21 times higher chances of closing as compared to leads that are responded to within 30 minutes.

Also start tracking your calls so you can analyze your conversations and make improvements based on results.

Summary

Armed with these 7 awesomely advanced ways to get more from your PPC campaigns, we send you off to track, measure, research, improve, and get more creative with your paid search advertising. And, of course, if you need any help doing that, you know how to

Know more about our PPC advertising approach and read our PPC success stories .

We, Gr8 Services are a leading digital marketing agency, based in JLT, Dubai; and part of WSI — the world’s oldest and largest digital marketing agency headquartered in Toronto, Canada. WSI has won the WMA (Web Marketing Association) Top Agency Award for 2 years in a row — for 2020 and 2019. Know more about WSI .