Today, investing in digital marketing is not optional anymore. It’s a necessity for all businesses that want to out-compete their rivals and grab their target audience’s attention. Even though organic traffic is still the backbone of your online presence, to take it to the next level, you need to combine it with paid search. Statistics show that PPC visitors are far more likely to purchase than organic searchers. Moreover, Google proved that search ads could boost brand awareness by 80%.
Of course, to generate positive ROI from your AdWords campaign, you need to build it strategically. Here are a few tips that may help you.
Step #1: Disqualify Irrelevant Leads
Marketing a product to someone who is not interested in it or who cannot afford it doesn’t make sense; this is why you first need to understand their needs, expectations, and problems. Most importantly, you need to know who can afford your products.
If you’re familiar with the famous Pareto Principle, then you know that 80% of your business revenue comes from just 20% of your leads. You need to focus on addressing that 20% and eliminate the rest. There are numerous ways to do so, but the simplest one is to choose the right keywords for your campaign.
For example, if you’re a luxury lingerie brand, running an ad for “women’s underwear” is just too generic. Apart from buyers looking for sophisticated products, it may also attract women looking for some cheaper options or larger discounts. Of course, the latter will probably leave your site without converting; this is why more precise keywords, like “women’s exclusive underwear” would drive more relevant traffic to your site and bring more substantial profits.
Step #2: Measure your Performance Regularly
To give your PPC campaign a boost, you need to monitor AdWords campaign from its implementation to completion. Based on what you find out, you can focus on what works for you, eliminate unprofitable strategies, and set realistic goals. Unsurprisingly, you need to start measuring the right KPIs to compare your performance to some industry standards and set a clear PPC benchmark.
Start with keyword-based KPIs, including:
- The number of clicks
- Cost-per-click- how much you pay for each click.
- The click-through rate- how often your ads are displayed, as opposed to how often they’re clicked on.
- Quality score- Google’s metric that focuses on your CTR, ad relevance, and landing page quality when ranking your ad.
- Impression rate- the percentage of all possible impressions your ad may receive.
There are also metrics based on results like:
- The conversion rate- the number of conversions.
- Cost per conversion- how much you pay to generate a lead.
- Total conversion value- how much your conversions are worth on average.
- Return on ad spend- the ROI you generate on your AdWords expenditures. You calculate it by dividing your profits with the costs of the campaign.
Step #3: Your Landing Page should Match the Ad
There are a few reasons why your paid ads shouldn’t lead to your homepage. First, it impacts user experience. A user expects to land on a page relevant to what they saw in the ad. Otherwise, they will leave your site. Second, there’s Google’s Quality Score. If it notices that your homepage isn’t relevant to the people clicking on the ad, it may rank you lower in the SERPs.
That is why your landing page should relate to the CTA in your ad text. If you’ve added any special offers, deals, or promotions to your ad, this is probably the primary reason why a user clicked on it. Precisely because of this, these offers should be featured on your landing page, too.
Step #4: Take Advantage of Geotargeting
Geotargeting has become quite a big deal, especially for local businesses. It lets you refine your PPC campaigns by displaying your ad to the customers in specific locations. Activating this feature in Google AdWords is pretty simple. Under its Locations and Languages section, you’ll be given a few options- to add a place to your targeted locations, to prevent your ad from appearing in specific locations and, finally, look for nearby areas that may be valuable to you. Here are a few rules of geotargeting in AdWords you need to know:
- Target only those locations were your target audience is.
- By excluding the locations that have nothing to do with your business helps you focus on the right customers.
- Use Google Trends can help you see who’s searching for a particular keyword by location. This way, you can learn what regions are most interested in products like yours.
- Make your address and call extensions prominent to help people connect with you.
- Add your location to your ad, especially the title.
Step #5: Optimize your Campaigns for Mobile Users
We’re living in the mobile-first era, where 80% of internet users own a smartphone. So, if you don’t consider your mobile searchers, you may lose a notable market share. Here are a few tips Google gave us on how to optimize ads for mobile users:
- Upgrade to expanded text, as it offers more space and works perfectly on mobile devices.
- Use the right ad extensions across your campaigns. They make your mobile ads more appealing for its searchers and help you show additional business information within the ads, such as your phone number or your website links.
- Polish up your ad. To get the most out of your ad, you need to create a compelling headline, include action-oriented keywords, have a powerful CTA, and highlight your key selling point in the description.
Step #6: Invest in a Responsive Website Design
PPC is just a medium that brings relevant traffic to your site. But, the fact that someone clicked on your site doesn’t mean you can now kick back and relax. You need to keep a visitor interested and inspire them to convert. This is why you need to ask yourself:
- Is my site fast enough? Stats emphasize that if your site takes more than 3 seconds to load, the majority of users will ditch it.
- Is my website navigation simple enough? Your navigation menu, CTAs, and links should be clear and user-friendly.
- Is my site mobile-friendly? Studies show that for 83% of mobile searchers, seamless experience across all devices is critical, while 57% them wouldn’t recommend a business if its site is not responsive.
Step #7: Take the Integrated Approach to SEO and PPC
When you google “SEO vs. PPC,” you will come across numerous posts explaining the difference between these two notions. However, what these resources usually fail to mention is the fact that SEO and PPC are two sides of the same coin. As such, they go hand in hand perfectly and, when integrated strategically, can:
- Help you create highly engaging organic content that resonates with the target audience within specific locations.
- Design personalized ads with unique messaging, according to your target audience’s location and needs.
- Boost brand awareness during seasonal peak points and attract new customers during low activity points.
- Make ads go further by using tactics like retargeting and leveraging tools like referral marketing software during the process.
Most importantly, AdWords can help you generate qualified organic traffic and find high-quality link building prospects, as Google is getting smarter day by day. So, by building poor-quality links on spammy sites, you won’t boost your authority and visibility in the SERPs. To expand your SEO efforts, you need to find authoritative link building prospects, and this is where AdWords’ placement tool shines. Once you type in a keyword, URL, or category, the tool returns lots of relevant sites you may be interested in reaching out to.
Over to You
It’s true that almost anyone can do PPC today. However, to set yourself apart from your rivals and boost your ROI, you need to build your AdWords campaigns strategically. Sure, the PPC landscape is generally highly complex, and there is a lot to know about it, but these are some basic steps that may help you when starting off.
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