If you’re a business looking to increase your online presence, chances are you’ve come across the term pay-per-click (PPC) advertising before. As a quick refresher, PPC is all about helping your company increase traffic by purchasing ads on both sites and search engines. These ads are poised to appear front-and-center when users enter specific keywords or keyword combos. The company or advertiser pays a dollar amount for each click these ads receive.
Just last year, 40 percent of brands increased their PPC spending, and with good reason—these ads garner an average of $2 for every $1 spent. The takeaway: PPC campaigns, when done right, work.
A solid PPC marketing campaign, however, is like a garden—it must be tended to and curated so that it continues to grow bigger and better. Today, we’re going to discuss some marketing tactics for keeping that PPC account looking lively and performing at its peak.
Keep an Eye on Keyword Performance
You’re competing against other brands for keyword slots, which means each keyword comes with a bidding price. These are based on keyword competition, your bidding strategy, and numerous other factors.
That being said, don’t waste your precious marketing budget on keywords that don’t truly work! Analyze keyword performance (with the help of keyword research tools like SEMRush, Google Search Console, and Keyword Surfer). These tools offer access to actionable data, such as the wheres and whens of keyword ranking and recommended keyword matches. Talk about a leg up on the PPC marketing competition!
Of course, monitoring keyword performance (and tackling the great beast that is performance marketing as a whole) can be time-consuming. For that reason, we highly recommend partnering with digital and search engine marketing experts in order to take the work off your plate and ensure you’re getting the most bang for your buck.
Check-in With Your Geo Budget
We love PPC search marketing because it allows you to target a particular demographic with tailored ads—in this case, based on that demographic’s physical location. If you’re a local business that’s concerned about reaching customers in your area (and about saving money when those local ads are underperforming), we recommend geofencing. Geofences are virtual perimeters, like a radius or set of boundaries, around real locations that help catch the attention of in-market virtual shoppers.
Geofencing through Google Maps is a match made in heaven—you can purchase space depending on the data you glean from demographic research, which determines where your ads appear. And when those ads aren’t giving you the ROI you’d hoped for? Cut that spending, adjust that geo boundary, and save yourself your hard-earned revenue.
Perform Time-of-Day Analysis
We’ve talked about cutting out underperforming ads, whether they’re not hitting the right keywords or reaching the most optimal locations. But we’d be remiss if we didn’t talk about time-of-day performance-based ads, too.
Let’s say you’ve shoveled your company budget away on ad slots that only appear from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. Let’s also say that not many shoppers are searching or buying your product during that time. That’s an extreme example, but one that illustrates our point. What if certain ads underperform on Mondays but excel on Saturdays? Refine your PPC strategy (i.e., precisely when those ads appear) keeping that knowledge in mind, and watch your results take off.
Determine Which Ad Copy Performs Best
Our little “cutting out the dead wood” technique applies to ad copy, as well! If a specific type of search network ad or ad theme is performing well, keep it coming—and if not, get rid of it, and use what you’ve learned to restructure.
How can you determine which ads are working well? Try a little something called A/B testing, which means comparing two versions of a site, email, or for our purposes here, ad copy, to get data on how each performs. What is your best-performing ad doing that the underperforming one is not?
All of this is to say that instead of revamping your entire ad strategy, all you have to do here is tweak a few variables to improve the performance of your entire campaign. Maybe that means creating a more catchy headline or opening sentence. Maybe your content needs more depth or a more rousing call to action.
Once you start testing, keep doing so regularly, so that you stay on top of what customers respond to positively. And if you’re looking for some helpful A/B testing tools, check out both Optimizely and Visual Website Optimizer.
Make Pay-Per-Click Advertising Simple With Snap
Keyword performance. Geofencing. A/B testing. We get it, that’s a lot of words and a lot of housekeeping, which is why you need a digital marketing agency with a history of success on your side. Reach out to Snap today—we’ll work with you to create and execute a powerful PPC campaign.