Proven PPC Strategies for Pay-Per-Click Success

For seventeen years, I have managed ads on Google, Microsoft, and other search engines. I have tried out almost all the A/B testing available on both platforms. Since the start, all the pay-per-click campaigns I’ve managed have been very successful. I have always been able to improve the results of an agency’s Google PPC campaign when I took it over in my career. Here are some important ways I help my customers make more money on their investments, which are different from the ways Google does it. Google’s goal with its suggestions and features is to make money for Google, not for you. Contact us on LinkedIn or leave us a message with your contact details here if you want a custom PPC proposal for your business.

AB Testing

You may maximise your return on investment (ROI) by AB testing all of the following. There are many more considerations, but these are among the most crucial.

• Landing Pages—Be careful to test a variety of landing pages against one other as their respective outcomes might vary greatly.
• Optimisation and testing of keywords should be done on a regular basis.
• To maximise CPA and lifetime value, test out various advertising tactics.
• Regardless of your current return on investment (ROI), you will most certainly be squandering most of your cash if you do not test all of these and more.

Regardless of your current return on investment (ROI), you will most certainly be squandering most of your cash if you do not test all of these and more.

Ad Copy Relevance

Keep an eye on the performance of your ads by reviewing their content and creativity on a regular basis. Improving your ad wording might be a fast victory if the CTR is poor. Consider your product or service from the customer’s perspective; what information would entice you to click on an ad and find out more about it? Check that the ad copy is easy to understand and pertains to the user’s query. Ad text should be tailored to the intended keywords.

Segmenting Ad Groups

Using a SKAG (single keyword campaign) to clearly demonstrate the performance of each term is a good strategy to use when managing ad groups, especially when time or resources are limited. Spending money on keywords that convert may be achieved by analysing each term individually. In order to determine which keywords are producing conversions, conversion tracking must be implemented. Grouping almost similar sets of keywords together will help you save money by utilising Exact and Phrase Match instead of Broad Match. For our clients to get the best return on investment (ROI), we often include 1,000s or even 10,000s of keywords in our keyword lists. Since it is hard to manage so many Ad Groups, we group keywords together in this way.

Ad Revolving

Your campaign’s objectives should guide your choice of ad rotation. Ad rotation may be configured in a way that maximises conversions by showing the most likely to convert advertising; conversely, if increasing traffic is your primary objective, ad rotation can be optimised to maximise clicks. Choose from;

Max out (your conversion rate)

Keep spinning forever (to get clicks)

Ad Schedules

Clients’ ought to be able to get to your products and administrations at whatever point it is most helpful for them. To amplify your advertisement, spend, you ought to centre your advertisements depending on the times of day when your clients are most likely to be online and make buys.

Target Demographics

You must have a exact portrayal of your clients in arrange to target them suitably. One of the primary steps in making a showcasing methodology is to recognize your target statistic. Make client personas that reflect your item or service’s target group of onlookers and their requests.

Financial plan

Make sure your budget is realistic and capable of supporting your development objectives.

You must ensure that you provide sufficient funds to your PPC campaign in order to generate a sufficient number of hits in order to initiate inquiries. A few pieces of information are required to resolve this issue:

Your marketing expenditure

How much money your business spends on clicking on ads.

Your website’s conversion rate

For market leaders, your sales and conversion funnel

You need to know your customers’ lifetime worth in order to set realistic CPA budgets.

Take your company’s advertising budget of £2,500 and a cost per click (CPC) of £2.50 as an example. You may anticipate 1,000 clicks every month.

From 1,000 clicks per month, you may anticipate 20 purchases or inquiries at a 2% conversion rate. If your website’s purpose is to produce leads rather than sales, you may utilise your sales conversion rate to determine how many sales you made using the data provided above.

Call Extensions

Including a call to action in your ad is another strategy to boost its conversion rate. In other words, it allows people to contact your company right from the search engine results page. This is the quickest approach to get in touch with prospective clients and offers them a summary of your contact information. Assign call extensions to revisions in the design.

Calls To Action

An viable call to action (CTA) is an vital portion of making pay-per-click (PPC) advertisement dialect. A call to activity (CTA) indicates the specified following step for the client.

Your calls to action won’t do their job unless they are:

• Just one simple call to action
• Relevant to the users search
• Relevant to the material on the page
• Containing some Urgency e.g. Make a reservation or give us a call in the present moment.

Incorporating special offers inside the call-to-action (CTA) might encourage customers to learn more and make a quick purchase if you have any.

Purpose of the Campaign
As you plot out your campaign, have a certain objective in mind. In launching this campaign, what are your objectives?

Every campaign needs a goal in order for all of its ads to be aimed at the same people and not compete with each other.

As an example, a campaign goal may be.

With the goal of halving CPA expenses by the first quarter of 2024.

Type of Campaign
Choosing a campaign type during setup is crucial since it dictates a lot of the future possibilities available to you.

Using Google Search Ads, you can zero in on particular terms that relate to your product or service and reach individuals who are actively seeking it. Using a display campaign setup is a must if you want to raise brand recognition and target various websites with your ads.

Measurement of Conversions
To know whether your campaign is successful, you must track its conversions. Just copy and paste a little code from Google onto your website, and it will accomplish this automatically. You should also have a special page on your website that says “Thank You” or “Sale Made” so that users can only reach it when they convert on your site. Optimising a campaign and getting the most out of it is impossible without conversion monitoring. If you’re working with a client who doesn’t have website traffic, or if you need hundreds or thousands of tracking links and an affiliate tracking system, you can still work without conversion tracking. At least you’ll know how many leads were delivered overall, even if you can’t break them down by keyword, device, time, ad, etc.

Market Segmentation
Your present client base’s demographic tendencies should inform your CPC bid adjustments. You should not serve female consumers if they make up 100% of your clientele.

If your average consumer is 45 years old, you may as well not advertise to anybody younger than that.

Creative Evaluation for Display Campaigns
There is only one opportunity for user engagement in a display campaign, and that is in the banner ad creatives. If you want your advertising effort to be as effective as possible, do the following:

Integrate mobile-friendly ad themes.

Make advertisements that are clear and concise.

Separate your search advertisements from your display ads.

Banner advertising should always be AB tested. Always produce two sets of creatives and use the best converter for the long term; you’ll always discover that one group converts better than the other.

Flexible Ads
Targeting consumers with appropriate advertising based on their search queries is made easy with dynamic ads. Using the search phrases entered by visitors, dynamic advertisements may determine which pages on your website are most relevant to their interests. In the event that your account does not include any relevant keywords or advertising, Google will promptly generate customised ads based on the search terms and direct users to the most relevant pages on your website.

When it comes to market targeting
Similar to how interests and hobbies may help you target people, Google also lets you know what people are interested in. To build your campaign’s target demographic, go to your users personas.

Sorts of Keyword Matches
Avoid using Broad Match targeting at any costs. We discovered that Broad Match was a total waste of money after doing many AB tests on it. In essence, Broad Match is designed for indolent campaign managers and serves as a means for Google to maximise their revenue from each click. Occasionally, when you use Broad Match, the search engines will provide you with terms that are completely useless. Using just Broad Match, we were able to slash another SEO agency’s cost-per-acquisition (CPA) expenses in the first week after taking over their campaign. They have squandered about £100,000 over the years. For waste-free and cost-effective results, employ Phrase Match and Exact Match. We discovered we could save around 70% by utilising Phrase and Exact Match instead of Broad Match, so we stopped using it years ago. You can discover all of the keywords you need using one of the many keyword scrapers available. One client we’ve worked with for a long time has asked us to find over 500,000 keywords for them. They’ve told us that every other agency’s CPA estimates for them are 400% to 500% higher than ours. One reason for this is that other agencies follow Google’s advice and use Broad, which is often auto-suggested and applied automatically unless you do something to stop it.

Investigating Keywords
Find out which search phrases people are using to find your kind of company by doing keyword research. This will show you which keywords are worth keeping in the campaign and which ones should be dropped. One strategy to reduce wasteful spending and boost conversions is to learn which keywords people will use to find your site. To do your study, using web tools such as SEMrush and Ubersuggest. We know from years of AB testing that Broad Match is far more costly than Phrase and Exact Match, therefore we recommend focusing on long-tail keywords instead.

Copy for a Landing Page
The following procedures must be fulfilled before a user may transition to route/sales:

Navigation: Search, Results Page, Click, Landing Page.

A visitor to your site has two options once they get there. Make the change or go. Make sure there is enough relevant material on the landing page to turn the visitor into an inquiry; it is your obligation. Your website pages are likely too crowded and fail to provide the visitor the information they need if sponsored traffic is not turning into leads or purchases. The solution to this challenge is to design a landing page that sponsored visitors is more likely to convert on.

The ability to create several landing pages that contextualise and tailor the offer is very advantageous. Having a separate landing page for each service or product is something we strongly advise. Additionally, we suggest that global businesses create market-specific landing pages. All of our AB tests over the years have shown that a simple flag and phrase or paragraph to localise by nation may increase conversions by around 30%.

Examining Keyword Intent
Misleading language may squander resources…

You can’t expect all relevant keywords to be suitable for optimising your pay-per-click ad. Make sure the keywords you’re targeting are really producing leads; we touched on this previously in the piece. Otherwise, you’re throwing money away on terms that won’t benefit your company.

For instance, if you utilise incentive keywords like “free” or “without cost” to generate leads, it might be a false economy in terms of post-lead conversion and lifetime value. This is because individuals using these keywords are only looking for advice and have no intention of paying for it. You may spend a thousand or tens of thousands of pounds trying to figure this out, and you could be unknowingly purchasing that much traffic each month with Broad match targeting.

Targeting specific locations
Do some research to find out who you may be selling to and where they hang out online. For example, a company situated in the UK would be foolish to get a US site unless it can reliably serve consumers in the US. Similarly, it’s best to limit your targeting to a certain radius to reach the most relevant possible attendees at a local event.

You must be smart about when, where, and how you spend your money since there is never enough.

Avoided Keyword Sets

Unless you utilise a negative keyword list, you will squander a tonne of money on keywords that won’t bring you anything.

As a matter of course, we automatically exclude incentive-based phrases like “free” because we presume that anybody entering has either no money or no desire to do business with your company.

People who aren’t interested in becoming customers but in finding a job at the firm use job-oriented keywords on brand search phrases like “vacancies,” “career,” and “jobs” as bogus hot keywords. Buying keywords that aren’t relevant might quickly eat up a significant chunk of your cash.

Product Catalogues

To have your products included in Google’s shopping list when a customer searches for them, you may include your product listing in your PPC campaign if your website has an e-commerce store. To get your name out there in search engine results, this is a fantastic strategy.

Using Remarketing

A person’s desire to purchase is shown when they click on your ad, which costs you money. At some point, you may get these clients to make a purchase from your site by remarketing to them. It is worthwhile to pursue these people since the majority of them will need to visit your site more than once. Google and Facebook are only two of several sites that allow you to retarget consumers.

Connecting websites

You may add extra content to your ad by using sitelink extensions. Users are encouraged to click on other sitelinks that provide sales information. The number of people clicking on the ad will increase as a result. However, not all landing pages are the same; some don’t get as many people to take action as others.

Automated Bidding

Ad campaigns may be fine-tuned with the help of Google’s AI engine via Smart Bidding, which analyses user behaviour and clicks to target the most probable customers. I will explain the operation of each automated plan type:

Enhanced Cost Per Click (eCPC) technology may detect if your ad is likely to result in a conversion and alter your offer accordingly. Under “Manual CPC,” you’ll find an automated version that you may activate by selecting the “Enhanced CPC” option.

Without having to manually adjust your application’s settings for each conversion, the “Maximise conversions” feature will set your campaign budget to the maximum feasible number of conversions.

If you want to maximise conversions without setting a conversion target, you may use Total Cost Per Acquisition (tCPA) to fine-tune your app directly.

The goal of establishing a target return on e-commerce sales (tROAS) is to maximise the amount of money you may earn from online sales.

With Maximise Clicks, you can automatically obtain more clicks for less money.

Some of these options let Google determine the CPC pricing automatically, which may be a huge gamble.

Examination of Target Keywords

Investigate the campaign’s target keywords to see how they are producing the expected outcomes. Go for keywords that bring in money. Finding out which subjects convert effectively, and which don’t should be your primary objective when analysing your topic objectives.

Feel free to reach out to us on LinkedIn or here online if you have liked reading this material and found it beneficial. I can also provide you with a unique PPC proposal for your company.

Frequently Asked Questions