There are dozens, maybe even hundreds of ways to get your business found online. It’s an enormous digital jungle out there, and there’s no set path through it to get your business in front of new prospective customers. Some methods will work brilliantly for one business, but be an absolute bust for another, which is why we always recommend researching your options and choosing methods that are likely to work for you. If you’ve done that and decided that PPC is a route you want to go down, here are 4 trickson how to optimise your PPC campaigns to get the best results.
What Is PPC?
Before we get into how to optimise your PPC campaigns, you need to understand what it is. PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click and is a form of advertising mainly found on Google, but it does also extend to other platforms like Facebook. You set a budget for advertising on a platform, just like other forms of advertising, but instead of just paying for the exposure, you only pay for the clicks you receive. This makes it one of the most very cost-effective methods of advertising online.
Pay-Per-Click advertising can play a very important role in your business’s broader marketing campaigns. Whether you’re looking to increase awareness or drive traffic for a very specific or time-sensitive campaign. Because PPC ads appear in the top 4 results of Google, they are a great way of getting ahead of the competition or breaking into new geographic areas. However, PPC can be expensive, particularly if you’re in a very competitive market, and it can take a lot of time and energy to manage, so it shouldn’t be your only marketing approach. Instead, it should blend into your SEO and other marketing efforts, providing the beginning of a lead-generation funnel for your business.
There are various types of PPC campaigns you can use, but these tips will work across the board. Some of the PPC avenues you might want to explore include:
- Search ads
- Local search ads
- Display network ads
- Pre-roll ads
- Remarketing
- Social PPC
Track Conversion Actions
PPC campaigns are great, but they’re only as powerful as the data behind them. Google gives you a whole host of data analytics tools that will help you understand who is clicking on your ads and what they do next – so use it! In particular, tracking conversion action is an extremely useful process, since it helps you understand which conversion action will be most effective, and where each should sit within your sales funnels. This means reviewing your CTA’s to see if there are any gaps, removing CTA’s that aren’t delivering results and updating any content that isn’t converting. All of this is easy to see within the analytics dashboard, and using it to make a few small changes can make a big difference to the success of your PPC campaigns.
Research New Channels
PPC is often associated with Google AdWords because let’s be honest, it’s the single biggest search platform out there. AdWords is sophisticated, works with millions of advertisers, and is always introducing new technology to improve the experience. But there are other channels out there you could be using to target your audience. For example, you could run PPC campaigns on Facebook, Bing, Instagram, YouTube (which is still within Google), LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit and more. Diversity is going to offer you the best success, so take a minute to find out where else your customers go to find information and develop a PPC strategy for those platforms too.
Use Audience Targeting Tools
AdWords comes with a tool called audience targeting as standard, and you should use it if you aren’t already. Audience targeting is a filtering method in the AdWords suite, which helps you drill down into who will see the ads in your campaign in granular detail. With this, you can select interests, behaviour, demographics or location, as well as keywords searched. Narrowing down your scope like this means you can make more effective use of your bids, and by regularly reviewing the results (using the Observation function) you can create a laser-focused campaign that’s more likely to generate results.
Increase Automation
Automation has come a long way in the last few years, but one of the areas it’s had the most impact in is marketing. There are now a wide variety of automation and AI tools that can help you manage your PPC campaigns more effectively, without investing huge amounts of time. Try looking into the automation tools around bidding strategies, ad scripts and campaign automation, all of which use data gathered by Google to produce a campaign which is statistically more likely to succeed. By doing this, you can focus your attention on planning and strategy development, and less on the boring, repetitive stuff.
At Lion Spirit Media our job is to help your business be found online. We use a combination of organic SEO techniques and PPC campaigns to make sure that your brand is front and centre on your customer’s screens, and that they can hear your roar above everyone else’s. If you’re curious about how PPC campaigns work, or are interested in working with us on your business, please just get in touch with the team to book your free, no-obligation consultation.
0 Comments