Pay Per Click advertising is a key opportunity of ensuring your website reaches the top of your user’s search results. There are a wide range of different goals that you can achieve from creating a PPC campaign including:
- Improving visibility
- Identifying new leads
- Bringing new traffic to your website
- Increasing conversions
One main goal of a PPC campaign is to simply grow your business, if you get it right. It can be a tricky element of marketing to crack if you don’t take the correct steps to a successful PPC campaign.
Optimise your Website
Before making any start to creating a PPC campaign, you must first ensure your website is in a good condition. The landing pages you will be directing your potential new users to must include great quality content that will keep your users on the page. The ad is what will intrigue and entice the user to your website, but the content on your landing page is what will determine whether they stick on your website or not.
The landing pages you are choosing to create PPC campaigns for must provide the user with more information about what you are promoting the page for. For example, if you are promoting theatre tickets for an upcoming show, your landing page should be further details on how to book that show not another irrelevant page on the site. The content within this page should provide them with everything they need to know about that show and they should be able to see the name of the show, the date of the show and a clear call to action on booking the show.
Another focus on optimising your website to ensure your new users stay on your site, is to ensure that your website performs efficiently. This involves whether the page they have clicked onto loads quickly, if it’s easy to navigate around the website or if there are any technical problems that are affecting their time on your site. All of these will encourage the user to click off your page and causing you to receive a high bounce rate. So to prevent this from happening you must
- Ensure your website loads quickly
- The navigation of the site is clear
- No technical problems occur that is likely to irritate the user
Select a Bidding Strategy
There are multiple bidding strategy options to choose from and the reason to choose each one is based on a few factors:
- Your budget
- Your experience with PPC
- Your goals
If you are new to PPC, it is advised to begin with manual bidding as you are able to set a cap on your cost per click but it does involve more management time for the campaign. Whereas automated bidding doesn’t require as much management, but you may end up paying more.
Set a Budget
The budget is one of the most important aspects of your PPC campaign and a great element of PPC is that you can limit your budget to control your spend throughout your campaign at any time. The budget is something you will have to determine based on how much you want to invest into each campaign. However, the duration of your campaign will have an impact on this budget if you don’t allocate the correct cost per click/maximum cost per day.
Keyword Research
Your choice of keywords that you use for your PPC campaigns are the next most important aspect of your campaign. Without keywords, there would be no way that your ad will reach the search engine to display your advert. Choosing the right keyword for your ad will also determine the success of your ad.
Some key tips to ensuring you choose the right keywords for you are:
- Compare what keywords your competitors are using
- Put yourself in your customers shoes, what would you search if you wanted to access your site
- Use Google’s keyword search to identify keyword opportunities
- Be specific with your keywords
- Choose local keywords, for example Atelier Studios Southampton
The better the keyword, the more likely chance your ad will appear first in the results. It is important to make use of the negative keywords, to prevent keywords coming up that are irrelevant to your business. For example if you are a car garage and are wanting to promote your cars, you could add a negative keyword to prevent the film Cars from showing up.
Create a Quality Ad
The best way to attract your users is to create compelling ad copy that entices them onto your site. This is a key element of a successful PPC campaign. Without the quality ad copy, your users will simply scroll past and you will lose potential customers to your competitors. Think about your keywords and what your users would have searched for to get this ad up, and how can you be enticed to click through to your own website?
Keeping the text short and sweet can also be attractive to your user. As long as the text outlines what your landing page will be about and it grabs your users attention. To help your ad grab your users attention, consider using an offer or proposition that other people within that keyword are not using. Give the user a reason to choose your page and not theirs.
Call to Action
Once you have created your compelling ad copy, you now need to ensure you give your users a call to action to encourage them to click through. Without a call to action, you are not giving the user an action on what they should do with your ad. For example, if you are promoting a show, your call to action would be “Book now”.
PPC isn’t that difficult once you get your head around the elements of the dashboard. The key thing to remember is to include optimising your landing page before you begin with anything else. Then you can set your budget, choose your bidding strategy, research your keywords, create your compelling ad copy and then add your call to action, then hit publish.
Once you have created your ads you should monitor them as often as you can, ensuring that the search terms are bringing your ad up for relevant searches and if not add them as negative keywords!
For more information on creating a successful PPC campaign, you can contact us via our contact form or give us a call on 02380227117