10 strategies to optimise your PPC ads and
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is one of the most effective ways to get new customers and drive sales when well optimised.
PPC campaigns are centered around targeting specific keywords, as a result of this you end up with highly targeted traffic to your website. This lowers the risk of getting low quality leads and improves your conversion rates on your website.
PPC has one major benefit compared to other inbound marketing strategies, like SEO, as paid ads are immediately served to Google. Even for a new business, you can get quick and easy results faster than relying on your other marketing strategies.
This does not mean you should completely stop strategies like SEO – these are long-term strategies for your own site and will help lower costs in the long run – but using PPC alongside your other strategies can boost your sales and leads dramatically.
Whether you do your digital marketing yourself, or you have a digital marketing company that do it for you. Let’s have a look at our top 10 strategies to optimise your PPC ads and increase sales.
Table of Contents
1. Create Well Defined Goals
So you’ve created your account and are ready to create your first campaign, but where do you start? What type of campaign do you run?
Until you have measurable and clear goals, you won’t be able to properly optimise your PPC campaigns. Your goals are like a map, without one you won’t be following the correct and optimal path to your goal.
First thing’s first, you need to determine what you are looking to achieve from your PPC campaign. Your goals would depend on your needs, but may include:
- Improve overall sales.
- Increase traffic to your website.
- Gain subscribers and/or downloads.
Setting clear and realistic goals like these will give you a clear understanding of what you want to do.
2. Revisit Your Keywords
Keywords are the most important part of PPC. When you first created your campaign you most likely had several keywords to cover. It is important to revisit these and expand your current list of keywords, and remove the underperforming ones. Divert your budget for those under-performing for new keywords, or increase your budget on keywords that are performing better.
As well as your search keywords, it is equally important to keep regularly checking your negative keywords. Negative keywords are essentially keywords that you don’t want to be found for, which further optimises your keywords and increase lead quality.
Use tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner to find new keywords that you could use for your campaign.
3. Use Localised Landing Pages
PPC has the ability to target audiences based on their geographical locations. For businesses with branches or services scattered across various areas you need to be taking advantage of this. Consumers love local businesses and according to recent polls 63% of shoppers prefer shopping locally. Local landing pages will provide consumers with a more personal experience and they’ll feel more comfortable purchasing your goods/service if they see you’re local. Need landing pages to be created for you? Have a look at what we offer.
4. Optimise Your Website
If your website loads too slowly, your PPC campaigns will fall far below expectations. Users are more likely to abandon websites that take longer than 2-3 seconds to load.
To check how fast your website loads, use tools such as GTMetrix or Google’s Pagespeed Insights. These tools will also tell you what needs to be changed, and how to change it. If you need help optimising your website, contact us.
A slow, non-optimised website = low conversion rate.
5. Use Ad Extensions
Ad extensions are crucial to PPC marketing and your campaigns. Ad extensions are easy and quick to do, they can be added manually on your dashboard, whilst there are some that can be automatically applied.
Some of the best ad extensions we’d recommend are sitelinks, callout and review extensions. These ad extensions will give the user a brief overview of what your site is all about, what people think about you, as well as direct links to certain webpages. Ad extensions give you a competitive edge over competitors, and can boost your traffic.
6. A/B Testing
A/B testing is the best way for you to constantly optimise your ads. There are numerous factors that can affect the amount of clicks your ads get so you should be testing different elements to see what has the greatest impact. A/B testing is where you have your ad that you’ve been running (A), you copy that ad but slightly change a small part of it on the new ad (B). For example, if Ad A has the headline of “Dog Walking – Call Now” your Ad B could have “Dog Walking – Contact Us”.
7. Re-marketing Strategies
Re-marketing involves tracking users that visit your website and sending them relevant ads in other websites that they browse, such as social media platforms. Have you ever wondered why ads keep appearing for things you recently searched for? That’s what remarketing is.
Re-marketing campaigns only focus is to target these previous users that you know are interested in what you have to offer. The ads help connect these visitors and persuade them to return to your website to complete the conversion.
This strategy can work wonders since you are targeting an audience in which you are aware of their needs. Due to their familiarity with your business, it can be much easier to convert them.
8. Change Your Bidding Strategy
If your bidding strategy isn’t working, don’t be afraid to change it, and don’t be afraid to try something new. Set your campaign to automatic clicks? Change it to Manual CPC so you can set your own bids, and have full control over your keywords. With manual CPC, you choose the maximum amount you want to pay for each keyword. So if you have a keyword that is a higher performer, you can bid higher than one of your keywords that has low traffic and a lower conversion rate.
9. Gain a High Quality Score
Quality is the key. Google assesses every ad’s bid amount, keywords and landing pages. It then give you a quality score from 1 to 10. The higher your score, the better you rank on Google. There are a few factors that effect your quality score; Expected CTR, Ad Relevance and Landing Page Experience.
To see your quality score, you can enable it in the customise columns section on your dashboard.
10. Use Long Tail Keywords
Long tail keywords are specific keywords that are narrowly targeted. For example, instead of searching “dog walking” a long term keyword could be “dog walking service near Bournemouth”. As you can see they are a lot more focused. Instantly your keyword targets people in that specific place you mention, not just the service as a whole.
These are just 10 strategies to optimise your PPC ads and increase sales, in reality, there are many more ways that can help, but these give you a great place to start.
Google Ads is always updating. Tomorrow, there may be even more ways to optimise your campaign. If you want to spend less time focusing on the marketing and let the experts take control of your ads, why not give us a call?
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