Running a successful digital marketing campaign in Tampa, FL does not need to be an uphill battle. A great way to begin harnessing the power of online advertising is to run a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign. Big and small companies alike should understand the massive source of revenue provided by PPC campaigns.
In 2017, about 7 million advertisers invested more than $10 billion in PPC campaigns worldwide. Even with a small budget, an expert pay-per-click campaign generates more website hits and a greater return on investment (ROI) than non-paid advertising alone.
Read on to learn how to manage your paid advertising campaign like a PPC professional.
How to Start an Expert Pay Per Click Campaign in 9 Steps
Follow these nine simple steps to craft a profitable PPC campaign.
#1. Establish Your Goals
Prior to designing your PPC campaign, you need to establish what you hope to achieve through the campaign. Do you want to increase your subscribers? How about boost sales? Or do you simply want to raise awareness about your brand?
The structure of your PPC strategy will heavily depend upon your end goal. Be sure to determine what you want to accomplish before you start and avoid wasting time and money going in the wrong direction.
#2. Know Your Target Audience
You must also know your target audience before crafting a paid marketing campaign like a PPC expert. Creating a consumer persona can help you visualize your ideal customer. You do this by learning about the people who like and use your products or services.
Conduct keyword research. Use analytics to find out what pages users access the most and where they look on those pages with heat maps. Review customer surveys and feedback or independent market research to learn more about their likes and habits. All this data will help you find your target audience.
#3. Determine the Best Keywords
While conducting keyword research to reveal your target audience, keep track of the words or phrases that appear most. Use a keyword tool to determine the best keywords of the bunch.
Remember that the more competition for a particular keyword, the higher the cost per click. Test out a variety of low and high competition keywords to see what works best for your campaign.
#4. Set a Budget and Work Backwards
Once you better understand your keywords and the hits they produce, you can set up a PPC campaign budget. Narrow down your keywords to the ones that generate the most clicks and focus on those. You can also do some research into the average cost per click (CPC) within your specific industry if you cannot pull from a large pool of data.
You can apply a general formula to determine the max profitability per click for a keyword. Use analytics data to fill in the following formula:
[profit per customer] x [1 – profit margin] x [website conversion rate] = Max CPCBe sure to target keywords with a lower estimated CPC than your max CPC otherwise you will end up losing money.
#5. Write Compelling Copy
No matter the size of your digital marketing campaign, you must always write compelling copy. This is especially true when you need to capture a potential customer’s attention with only a few written lines.
Aim to craft headline and description copy that gets inside a consumer’s head. Make personalized ads that highlight the value of your service or product. Personalization does not mean serving up dynamic ads that feature a customer’s name. It means knowing why your target customer would need to your goods or services and including a focused call to action based on that knowledge.
#6. Include a Powerful Call to Action
Your ad’s call to action will determine whether you succeed as a PPC expert or fail like a beginner. Ask the potential customer to do something with powerful words proven to encourage them to click like:
- You
- Get
- Buy
- Shipping
- Best
- Save
- Free
- Your
#7. Consider Including Ad Extensions
Ad extensions do not increase the cost of your PPC ad campaign despite the benefits they provide. Both Bing and Google offer ad extensions through their PPC programs. These extensions allow searchers to take certain actions without leaving the search engine results page.
There are many different kinds of extensions, but here are just a few examples. A call extension adds a clickable phone number. A review extension shows top reviews for your product. A callout extension lists other pages on your website that take the searcher directly to the page when clicked. All these extensions make it easier for searchers to find what they need with fewer clicks.
#8. Create a Welcoming and Relevant Landing Page
Once you go to all this trouble to craft an intriguing PPC advert, do not just send users to your homepage. Creating a specific landing page to funnel through potential customers will result in a much higher ROI.
A PPC professional ad should send traffic to whatever page relates most to the ad and the promise made to the user in the ad. If your ad states the user will be able to enter a drawing for a new pair of shoes, they better arrive on a page with a registration form. A welcoming landing page should always include similar keywords and load very quickly to keep the user’s attention.
#9. Monitor Your Results
Once you set your PPC strategy in motion, have a plan to continually monitor it. Monitoring your analytics saves you money by revealing when to eliminate poor performing adverts. Keep an eye out for how certain keywords perform and adjust bidding to focus on the words with the most ROI.
Strategies for Ads on Google, Facebook, and Bing from Top PPC Professionals
Already comfortable running a basic PPC campaign? Check out these expert pay-per-click strategies that will improve your ROI and boost your conversion rates.
Most marketers and small business owners looking to run their own PPC campaigns begin with Google AdWords. Once you familiarize yourself with the platform, you can delve deeper into its more complicated features.
Add Reviews
Consumers love online reviews. Research shows that 88% of consumers consider online reviews as trustworthy as a personal recommendation. Adding reviews to your PPC advertisements earns you a potential customer’s trust immediately. They do not need to click onto another page first.
Google AdWords allows you to include reviews as long as the product or service has at least 30 unique customer reviews. It requires an extension and Google only charges if someone clicks on the ad. They do not charge you if the user only looks at the review.
Enable Accelerated Delivery
Accelerated delivery is very advanced and only true PPC professionals with a larger budget should enable it. In the standard ad delivery method, Google uses algorithms to predict how often people search for your keyword. These algorithms also determine how often to show your ad based on your budget and similar prior campaigns.
The standard ad delivery method spreads the ads throughout the whole day. This may leave you with unspent budget money if more people click in the morning and less in the afternoon.
Alternatively, accelerated delivery allows Google to show your ads whenever people seem to click the most. It will submit your ad into the ad auction until your budget reaches its limit. You hit your budget limit sooner, but get access to the better clicks.
Bing
A PPC professional marketer leaves no potential source of clicks untapped, so consider running ads on Bing if you do not already. Bing accounts for the highest number of desktop hits with 77% taking place through its search engine. Here are a few techniques to positively impact your Bing PPC campaign.
Ad Scheduling
Bing’s ad scheduling feature works even better than the one in Google AdWords. In AdWords, you must schedule each post in every individual time zone. Bing lets you schedule a post in your time zone between 8 am and 9 am in EST and it does the same thing in any other time zone you select.
Location Targeting
Any expert PPC campaign will take into account location targeting and Bing makes this easy. Their ad tool allows you to target specific locations with different ads depending on what works best. Google AdWords does not offer this same laser-focused location targeting.
Partner Targeting
Again, unlike Google, Bing offers a more focused partner-targeting tool for their PPC ads. Choose to show ads based on demographics and the device used for search along with the time of day and specific locations. Bing’s tool also provides data about which search partners send traffic to your website.
Facebook might not be a search engine in the traditional sense. However, a survey done by the analytics company Aimia revealed that of the users making purchases through social media 19% make direct purchases through Facebook. Here are a few strategies for tapping into that PPC market.
Retargeting
Have you noticed that when you log onto Facebook not long after visiting certain websites you will suddenly see ads for that same website? This is a PPC marketing strategy called retargeting. It reminds potential customers of their interest in your products or services.
Facebook allows you to customize your target audience based on a variety of factors. Choose to target people who viewed a particular page on your site or the website as a whole. You can even target potential customers based on how long ago they last visited your site. Enable retargeting in your Facebook ad settings.
Life Events
Since Facebook has access to so much personal data, you can gear your ads towards consumers based on the current happenings in their life. Choose life events based on your industry for the best results.
For example, if you sell wedding supplies, you only have a small window of time to advertise to the bride and groom. Targeting recently engaged people during the several months leading up to their wedding gets you more clicks than if your ad appeared on a single person’s dashboard.
Leave it to the PPC Experts
Not sure you have the time or knowledge to run your own successful PPC campaign?
Leave it to our expert PPC professionals in Tampa, FL!
Call us today to start earning more from your paid advertising campaign as soon as possible!
