PPC ads are one of the most popular ways to advertise online. By creating ads and taking advantage of effective PPC Campaign Management, companies can get their ads in front of interested parties. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.
PPC ads can be extremely effective—when done right. If you’ve wanted to learn more about PPC marketing or want to improve the results you’ve achieved so far with your PPC campaigns, you’ve come to the right place.
PPC doesn’t need to be confusing. In this article, we’ll decode what it takes to create a winning pay-per-click ad campaign so you can boost your skills.
Building and executing an effective and successful PPC campaign involves simultaneously managing many different moving parts. Whether you’re managing PPC for the first time or are looking for some new tips, this guide will make it simple and easy for you to hit your goals. Read on to learn how you can set up, optimize, and manage your PPC campaigns to drive more traffic to your website and increase your conversions.
What Is PPC Campaign Management?
PPC stands for pay-per-click, meaning that you pay a fee every time someone clicks on one of your ads. While other ads may require you to pay for a set number of impressions (how many times your ads show up), PPC ads are billed based on your bids and how many clicks you receive. You can limit your daily, weekly, and monthly ad spend to create a campaign that fits within your marketing budget.
Essentially, You specify how much money you’d be willing to pay for each visitor who clicks an ad and arrives at your website. You also choose phrases or keywords that you’d like your website to be associated with when people are searching.
PPC ad campaigns are a valuable way to attract new visitors to your site without earning them organically. They allow you to reach your target audience by advertising to them in the places where they’re hanging out online.
As prospective buyers begin researching companies selling the product they’re looking for, they’re naturally attracted to those with a high Google ranking. With PPC ads, you can get to the top of the search results—even above organic search results. PPC also helps you position your company as an expert in your niche, increasing trust in your business and building your brand.
PPC campaign management is about getting the most out of your PPC campaigns. This includes making sure they’re set up correctly, optimizing them effectively, and adjusting your campaigns when necessary.
To get the best results possible, you’ll need to continually check and see what’s working and what isn’t, run tests to identify new opportunities, and make changes as needed. This will ensure you’re not wasting your marketing budget on strategies that don’t give you the best ROI.
Google Ads
Google Ads remains the most popular option for PPC campaigns because Google is still the world’s largest search engine. You can also run PPC campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, and Bing.
Google Ads allows you to create ads that will appear on their search engine, primarily at the top of search results. Once you’ve bid on your keywords, your ad may be shown to individuals searching for those keywords.
Depending on your industry, there can be a lot of competition for keywords since Google has a huge number of advertisers. To determine which ads it’ll show, Google looks at the size of a bid and the relevance of an ad campaign and keywords. These two components make up what is called “ad rank” and can be broken up into the two following metrics:
Your CPC Bid
This is your cost-per-click bid, which is the highest amount you’re willing to spend when someone clicks on your link.
The PPC process is a bit like an auction, with the winning advertisers reaching prospects based on predetermined advertising rates that fit their budgets.
Your Quality Score
This includes:
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- The quality of your landing page
- The relevance of your ad
- Your click-through-rate
By increasing your bid or improving your quality score, you can make it more likely that your ad will show up when searchers are looking for your services or products.
How to Manage your PPC Campaign
Ready to get started with your PPC campaign management? There are a few things you absolutely need to do correctly in order to have a successful PPC campaign.
Pick the Right Keywords
The first step is to check your customer demand. Obviously, if no one is searching for your service or product, PPC isn’t going to work. You need to verify that there is a decent search volume for what you’re planning to offer.
You can do this by using the Google Keyword Planner. This tool is almost like using a thesaurus. Simply make a list of the phrases you think your leads may be looking for, and enter them into the tool. The tool will give you other relevant, similar phrases.
It’ll also tell you:
- How many people are searching for those keywords
- How competitive they are in Google Ads
- How much you would need to pay to use each keyword
With this in mind, you’ll need to answer three questions:
- What’s the search volume for this keyword? Are people typing it into Google?
- Are the people looking for that keyword likely to purchase from you?
- Can you afford to use that keyword?
Make a list of your potential keywords that meet the above criteria.
Spy on Your Competitors
Most industries will have businesses that have already optimized their PPC campaigns. This means they’ve done the work for you and have already determined which landing pages, ads, and keywords will work in your niche.
You can find out this valuable information by using a tool called KeywordSpy. This tool gives you access to the important historical advertising information that your competitors would rather keep to themselves. It’s a paid tool that lets you run searches to see how your competitors are using PPC and further research the keywords you are considering for your own campaigns.
You can also run searches based on your keywords to see who is showing up, what their ads say, and where they lead to, though this will take longer.
Optimize Your Copy
When investing in PPC campaign management, it’s super important that you have a strong unique selling proposition (USP). Your USP is what makes you stand out from the competition. It gives potential leads a reason to choose your business over your competitors.
This means focusing on your core strengths and finding out what you do better than similar businesses. But you also need to effectively communicate this to the person searching.
When you work hard to create the best possible copy, you:
- Attract qualified leads who will choose your ad over your competitors’
- Repel unqualified leads who are unlikely to buy and would waste your ad budget by clicking through
Quality copy should relay who you are, what sets you apart, and why someone should click on your ad. Your call-to-action should be clear and can include a special offer or other enticement to get peole to take the next step.
Track Your Conversions
Conversion tracking allows you to measure how many sales your PPC campaign is generating. These metrics show you which ads and keywords are encouraging customers to buy.
You can find the conversion tracking code under “Tools and Analysis” within your Ads account. You can then add that code to your receipt or thank you page so each purchase made from your PPC ads is properly accounted for. This will come in handy for monitoring the effectiveness of your campaigns and for optimizing them.
Optimizing Your Campaigns
Much of the above work can be done at the beginning of your campaign. But PPC campaign management also involves continually adjusting and optimizing your campaigns along the way.
This is all about cutting out the things that aren’t working and investing more resources into the things that are working.
Here are some things to consider while working on your PPC campaign management:
Pruning
Just like how gardening involves cutting away overgrown and dead stems and branches, pruning your keywords involves removing the keywords that are holding you back.
These include:
- Keywords that are generating clicks but not converting
- Keywords with low Quality Scores (start with 3 or lower)
- Keywords converting at an unprofitable cost
You can see this information under the “Search terms” subtab in your Ads account.
By removing the keywords that aren’t working well, you can spend more on those that are making you money. And of course, you can always research additional keywords and test them out to see how well they perform for you.
Bid Optimization
Bid optimization lets you determine which keyword bids will give you the most profitable conversions.
You do this by determining how much you can afford to pay for each conversion while still making a profit. This depends on a few different things like:
- Your customer lifetime value
- Your business
- What you consider a conversion (phone call, sale, demo, etc.)
You can then measure each keyword’s conversion rate. Finally, determine the maximum you can afford to pay for each keyword.
As you continue to get more data, you can move your keywords around into different campaigns. That way, you can run tests on the keywords that are low-converting or haven’t yet proven to be profitable. You want to test your copy, offer, and landing pages. For example, if you are getting lots of clicks but no conversions, then you may want to ensure that your copy is clear and attracting the right audience and that your landing page is engaging and built to help potential customers take that next step and either make a purchase or schedule an appointment.
Campaign Targeting
When you’re serious about PPC campaign management, you need to consider the following:
Devices
The performance of your ads will vary hugely, depending on the device your customers are using. Prospects using mobile devices usually have lower conversion rates compared to those using desktops.
If your data contains a mix of information from both device types, you’re not getting the full picture.
You may find that your campaign works great for desktops but has an awful conversion rate for mobile users. If you were to stop targeting mobile users, your campaign could be much more profitable. Similarly, you may find that some keywords or offers are more compelling to people on mobile devices. You won’t know, however, until you segment your data and monitor results by device type.
Geography
PPC campaign management is also about geographic targeting. This means looking at your data and reviewing performance based on location.
With geo-targeting, you can see which locations you’re allocating your resources to and which are the most profitable. This allows you to exclude locations that aren’t converting and amp up campaigns for the ones that are. You can also create ads that are specific to different areas to improve your conversions. For example, you may find targeting zip codes that include the city center during the workday increases your orders, but targeting more rural areas during that times leads to low-converting campaigns.
Time
You should also review how your campaigns perform by day of the week and time of day.
It’s likely that different campaigns will perform better during certain days of the week and times of the day. Under the “Settings” tab, you can adjust your bids based on the day and time so that you are only bidding on the most profitable days and times for your campaigns. This is especially useful for time-limited services. If you offer meal delivery services, for example, there’s no reason to waste ad spend during your closed hours since no one can make a purchase then.
Need Help With Your PPC Campaign Management?
As you can see, a lot of work goes into active PPC campaign management. Without it, companies can end up blowing through their marketing budgets without scoring many qualified leads.
While it can seem easy to launch an ad campaign, proprly setting one up, monitoring it, and optimizing take a lot of effort. And many businesses simply don’t have the time to tackle the learning curve and focus on their PPC campaigns when they have so much happening with their businesses already.
Ultimately, though, a few tweaks along the way can transform a so-so campaign into a highly profitable one. Take that next step and start driving more traffic to your website with PPC ads. Get in touch today and let’s talk about auditing your current campaign or getting you started with a new one.
