The Golden Rules of PPC: Maximize Your Success in Pay-Per-Click Advertising

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PPC – What exactly does it mean?

Let’s start off with typing ‘PPC optimization’ into Google…

Our results are in and it comes to 31,300,000 results in (0.52 seconds)

There are countless variations on the theme: “PPC optimization techniques”, “PPC optimization strategies” and so on.

Benjamin Franklin supposedly once said, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.”

You can spend countless amount of time optimizing a Pay Per Click advertising campaign, but if you haven’t laid down the groundwork correctly, you’re just wasting time and money. This is true no matter what type of ads you’re running: Facebook Ads, Google Adwords or retargeting campaigns.

In this article, you can find the rules that you must follow in any PPC advertising campaign to give you a great start.

1. Outline Your Advertising Goal

If you are looking to succeed in any type of activity & industry, I advise you that you always start with outlining your goal. This isn’t just about making your dreams work and turning them into a reality, but also your advertising strategy. First, you plan, then you act.

If you don’t know what you’re aiming for, anything will do, right? But it may not necessarily work this way with PPC.

Being able to measure how you’re doing against your objectives is one of the best parts of PPC advertising and digital marketing in general. Why not take full advantage of it?

Start planning your PPC campaign by outlining what you want to achieve. Do you want to increase the traffic to your website? Do you want to increase sales by 10% or will 2% be more realistic?

2. Define Your Budget

The most popular PPC advertising platforms (Google Adwords, Facebook ads) ask for a daily budget. That can trick you into spending a lot of money unnecessary before you know it.

Tt’s easier to keep costs under control if you define an overall budget for your PPC campaigns at the beginning. By planning ahead, you won’t be left surprised that you have to spend a lot more than you can afford to.

A golden tip is to consider how much you can afford to spend on advertising per month and split it across campaigns. Divide your monthly budget across search, display, retargeting or add networks like Facebook Ads, Linked In, Google, etc…

3. Consider Your Audience

This step has to possibly be done at the very beginning of your planning. Understanding your audience will help you in planning the right content and scheduling it at the right times. Your audience plays a central role in your PPC advertising campaign. Capturing their interests is crucial.

If your audience is not even remotely interested in your ads, you’re just throwing money out the window. Think about it – would you click on something that fails to attract your attention? Unless you take a great interest in water sports or leave close to the water – you won’t click on an ad that promotes surfing boards…

When you’re planning your PPC advertising campaign, take a moment (read as possibly a day or two) and think about the audience that you’re trying to reach. Who are they? What are they afraid of? What do they want? How old are they? What are their demographics? How can your product or service come in to solve their problems or fulfill their needs?

Empathy is a great way to establish a connection and attract your audience’s attention. Create your ads and your landing page around your users’ needs and wants and you will find yourself following the right path.

4. Structure Your Campaigns According to Theme

Avoid the temptation to create a single PPC advertising campaign that targets a very wide audience and promotes everything there is about your business, product or service. People don’t usually like ads being thrown at them everywhere possible. Never mind adds that are too long and are trying to sell you everything at once.

A good thing about PPC is that you get to control who sees your ad and create different ads according to the theme.

It helps you stay on top of things and it keeps your campaigns organized and easier to manage. Also, this allows you to create ads that are highly relevant and, in turn, with a higher chance of a conversion.

It enables you to see which product categories or audiences bring in a return on investment. By adding more structure to your ads, you are making it easier to track and control costs.

5.Monitor Your Campaign

The worst mistake you can do is to set up a campaign and not check or evaluate its performance. Even if you’ve done all the prep work correctly, even if you’ve set up your PPC advertising campaign correctly, your job does not stop there.

Monitor your campaign to see that everything’s going according to plan. Yes, there will be adjustments and there is a learning phase in which you experiment with different settings until you find the ones that bring in conversions. But that requires monitoring and attention.

6.Assess Performance Correctly

Engagement can be defined in many ways. For content marketers, engagement is a combination of time on page with social media shares. For website owners, engagement is a combination of metrics such as bounce rate, pages per session and average session duration.

Additionally, look outside your ad campaign to get a full view of the effect. For display advertising campaign, there might not be an increase in conversions or leads, but there might be an increase in organic traffic for your company.

7.Install Conversion Tracking

Most advertising networks provide conversion tracking, yet only a few marketers use it.

If you’ve set your PPC advertising objectives and an approximate maximum CPA, you know what you want to measure.

Here is where conversion tracking comes in.

It allows you to see what users do on your website after they have clicked your ad. It also enables you to see if you’re getting a return on investment from your campaigns. Without it, you don’t know if your campaigns are bringing in a profit or are running a sudden loss.

Before starting a PPC advertising campaign, make sure you install conversion tracking and set up your conversions.

8. Use a Call to Action

This is one of the basic, yet often overlooked rules in PPC advertising. If you don’t tell your audience what to do next, they won’t do it. Without a (strong) call to action, people won’t feel compelled to take the next step, in the likes of subscribing to your website or purchasing a product.

Here is where the perceptual set theory comes in…

According to the theory, the mind perceives objects through an active process of selection, inference, and interpretation. We naturally form expectations when we see a landing page or a banner ad and our brain somehow knows what to expect next.

To be effective, the call to action should fit in naturally with your copy. Pay attention to context and align your CTA with the rest of your messaging.

For example, don’t advertise a 10% discount for clothes and use a call to action that says “submit”. Go for something that would go naturally with your landing page or PPC ad copy: “Shop now” or “Buy now”.

 

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