Top Tips to Improve Your PPC Campaign

PPC (pay-per-click) advertising sounds like a dream. You pay to have your website rank first on a search engine and you only pay if someone clicks on it. It sounds pretty straightforward.

But the reality is a lot more complicated. Okay, so you only pay when someone clicks on the link, but they then have to buy your product or service for it to be worthwhile. So if your product isn’t priced well, or if the page doesn’t work properly, then you could end up wasting a lot of money. Then you have to think about keywords. If your product doesn’t answer the question that the searcher is asking, you won’t make any sales either.

Then, you’ve got to take into consideration all the data that is involved with PPC. If you don’t understand the data from your campaign, you won’t be able to improve your conversion rate. PPC is difficult to get right. But we’re here with Hunt Digital to provide some solid tips to make sure you build a successful PPC campaign.

1. Learn How to Track Your Campaign

Tracking is one of the most important aspects of PPC advertising. It’s amazing how many people set up campaigns and then just leave them to run. To run a successful PPC campaign, you need to be tracking everything right from the start. By making small adjustments you can get huge results. These could be changes to the keywords, changes to the copy, or even increasing your budget. You should be looking to improve two different metrics:

Click through rate is how many people are clicking on your ad. You can improve this by changing the text or image on the ad, or by trying to rank for different keywords. Conversion rate is how many of those clicks turn into sales. There are many different things that can affect this including price, images, copy, design, offers, etc.

2. Don’t Forget About Organic Search Marketing

Some people will naturally scroll past PPC ads if they don’t know the company name, so it’s important to use organic search marketing as well as PPC. Cut My Plastic do this successfully. If you can get to the top of the rankings on Google as well as having a paid advert, you should be cleaning up!

Also, by having an effective organic SEO strategy, you will understand your customers and keywords a lot more. That should lead to a really effective PPC campaign.

3. Improve Your Quality Score

Google – and other search engines – rate the quality of your keywords with a quality score. It gives the keyword a numeric value between 1 and 10 that is based on the relevancy of your keywords, the quality of your ad copy, and the quality of the landing page. The better score you get, the more frequently Google will show your ad and the lower your cost-per-click will be.

Ad copy – Improve your ad copy by making sure it is well-written, relevant, and optimised for SEO. It is well worth investing in the services of a copywriter to help you with this. The power of great sales copy can never be underestimated!

Landing page – The landing page is essential to your ad’s success. Make sure the page is optimised for mobile, tablet, and desktop. Also make sure you have a high-quality image of the product, easy to find “buy’ buttons, and plenty of product information. After this, check your sites speed by running a speed test. Customers won’t wait around for a site that isn’t fast.

Keywords – Choosing the right keywords is essential to your campaign. For your first campaign, you want to choose keywords that aren’t too competitive (i.e. not too many companies trying to bid for it) because you will get a better cost-per-click.

4. Use Additional Links

Google gives you an option to have additional links in your advert. This is a great way of testing different call-to-actions on the ad and see how you can improve. Having additional links provides the user will more options when they read your ad. If you have an offer that has a lot of sub-offers, it can be a great way of providing the user with added value.

5. Increase Your Budget

Once you have an effective PPC campaign on a small budget, it is time to increase your budget. It’s worth doing this in small increments to start off with and gradually getting bigger. When you start paying large amounts for PPC, you will notice that tiny changes can have a huge effect on your profit. This is why it is good to practice with a smaller budget beforehand. By increasing your budget, you can get a lower CPC and a higher click-through-rate.