Ready to run an amazing PPC campaign? Before you start, these five techniques will guarantee that your ads perform for your company and attract lots of convertible traffic to your website.
PPC ads, also known as pay-per-click ads, are a great way to break into the often complex world of online advertising. Some 45% of small companies invest in PPC ads because it’s the most affordable way to start getting visitors to your business website.
You must make sure that your ads are set up correctly, or you could be overpaying for clicks and wasting money on ads that don’t perform for you. The right blend of techniques will result in a reliable approach to sourcing potential customers for your brand that will buy your products.
Here are five easy techniques that will help you optimize your PPC campaign like a paid advertising professional. Run through this checklist of techniques before your next ad goes live.
Review Your Campaign Budget
So, how does pay-per-click work?
Let’s say your online shop is live, and sales are trickling in—slowly. You can speed up this process by investing in a PPC campaign. It’s called pay-per-click because you only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad. Sounds easy, but there are some tricky parts!
The first thing you need to review is your campaign budget. How much can you afford to spend on a paid ad campaign? All pay-per-click marketing strategy budgets start small. You don’t want to launch an untested ad and throw a huge budget at it.
Instead, run an ad campaign for a while and review the data. Then improve it, and rerun the ad. Campaign data monitoring is how you’re going to get your budget right. Make sure Adwords conversion tracking is on, and dedicate a small budget to each run before review.
Link your Adwords account to your Google Analytics account to take advantage of the data. Start with an ad on the search network, and set a modest daily budget. Track your results and sit with the data to understand how to make improvements.
Here’s how to find out what a reasonable starting budget should be.
Once you hit on an ad formula for your online shop that is generating you solid leads, then expand your budget. Until then, you’re all about the testing process.
Align Your Target Audience
Your PPC strategy should be heavily focused on your customer.
Who you’re targeting is key to getting your ads to convert for your online store. This can be a challenge, especially if you have many products you want to promote—and a wide range of audiences you could potentially reach.
As a rule, general audiences are more challenging to convert than specific ones. So, keep it simple at first by picking a particular product or service, and dedicate your time to it. Pay-per-click ads let you target your audience effectively, so it works well if you know who they are.
- Knock out a few buyer personas to guide you (71% of businesses that smash their revenue goals out of the park use these)
Ecommerce audience targeting is about reaching real people who are ready to investigate or buy what you’re selling. Target by age, income, geographical location, and interests—the more specific, the better. This is why buyer personas work like a charm—they paint a clear picture of your target.
When you know who is seeing your ad, you can make it so personalized and intriguing they can’t help but click. When this leads to a similarly targeted landing page, your shot at achieving that sales conversion goes way up.
Start With a Landing Page
Before you start tweaking keywords or testing ads, you need to focus on the landing page you’ll be using to convert your ad traffic. Don’t waste your time or money channeling leads to your homepage or other random pages. You need to bring the big guns for a targeted PPC campaign.
That means adding specific landing pages that are targeted to the same audience as your proposed PPC ads will be. They go hand in hand. After a lead has clicked your ad and arrives on your page—there should be a serious strategy in place to convert that lead!
A lot of small business owners fall short at this point—don’t be one of them!
You should be able to add these targeted landing pages to your online store quickly and easily. Once your landing page has a definite goal in place, you can use your ad traffic to split test the page and improve your conversion rate (how many visitors end up buying).
Remember that there are always two parts to an effective ad campaign—getting the right ad traffic and converting that visitor into a sale. Test your landing page, improve how well it closes sales, and gets you results—to maximize your ad spend.
Review Your Keywords
Keyword research is critical to a high-performing PPC campaign, and it works exceptionally well when that campaign is also targeted to a specific audience. This is because your keywords are easier to narrow down into intent-specific keywords.
Great PPC ads don’t just use any old competitive SEO keywords; they focus on Google keywords driven by search intent. This is when your audience is actively looking for something you’re selling, using a specific term or phrase.
By focusing on these incredibly effective keyword sets and integrating them into your landing page, too—you maximize your organic and paid SEO. This brings in the most traffic for your keywords, delivering customers who are ready to buy, and eager to hear your pitch.
Test different keyword sets to find a range of intent-specific phrases to add to your landing page. Then, test ads to see which terms deliver the best converting customers. Your ecommerce business should focus on information, evaluation, and purchase decision buying stages.
Optimize Your Ad Copy
How do you optimize your ad copy to be competitive in your niche? The easy answer is knowing what your competitor’s adverts look like and then doing something to stand out. Use analytics tools to perform competitor research and figure out how to make your brief ad copy the best option.
You’re not selling the product or service in your ad; you’re only trying to get that click. Once your customer has arrived on your ecommerce platform, it’s up to your landing page to make the sale.
Your PPC campaign doesn’t exist in a void. Especially in search, you’ll appear with other ads that are targeting the same people. Find out what they’re saying and what keywords they’re using—and figure out a way to have a better call to action. Test, test, and test again!
Stick to these techniques, and you’ll develop your own method for producing high-converting landing pages coupled with high click rate PPC ads that don’t cost a fortune. Once you find an excellent formula at a decent cost per click, the more money you put in, the more sales you’ll get out.
Your online business needs a website that allows you to quickly add new landing pages so you can take advantage of an optimized campaign. Anything less, and you stand to lose money.
Invest in a PPC campaign optimized to work for you, and you’ll grow further and faster than your competitors. Start small, then test your way to success!
