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In the world of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, there will always be challenges. However, with the coronavirus’s aftermath, it’s even more important to be prepared for a new reality. Every industry and its advertising will be affected due to new economic and social realities. New demands, preferences, and demographic makeup will require a shift in your approach to your brand or client’s approach to Google Ads.
Instead of missing out on leads, sales, and other conversions, use the right plan to put yourself ahead of the competition. Learn to craft the right message to your audience in the right way for your campaign.
In this article, we will explore the best tips and tactics to boost your PPC conversions. We’ll start with planning and get to specific tactics that can help you achieve campaign goals and, ultimately, more profit with your PPC ads. Let’s dive in with how to start a PPC campaign:
Having strong goals is essential in any Google Ads campaign. This is true regardless of your product, service, or industry. You will have specific goals for your campaign based on your budget, timelines, and market characteristics. Having a framework starting outlets, you keep your campaigns on track without wasting money on underperforming ones. Keep in mind how the global COVID-19 pandemic has changed your market for better or worse and set realistic and achievable goals, so you don’t get impatient and make mistakes.
The landscape has shifted for most industries. While some are seeing traffic increases, others have seen their traffic fall and their costs rise. You need to be able to adjust to the ongoing market changes and update your strategy accordingly. It might even be necessary to restart your campaigns from scratch. But old and historical data always has its importance. You can forecast the results based on that data but that result must be affected by the pandemic situation now. You can find different trends as well to identify user intents, how it is changing.
While there will be some crossover in your goals from before the pandemic, it’s time to take a look at your new goals. See how they line up with the strategy you’ve created. Does this strategy seem to be valid based on what you know now? To answer this question, here are some good things to look at:
Your traffic is arguably the most critical part of your ad campaign. As the top of your funnel, it is the fastest way to drive visitors to your landing page where you can truly complete the purchase or conversion.
There are three aspects to focus on when aiming to increase your traffic:
Your ads must target your audience as precisely as possible. You should use keywords they are likely to search for or related terms. For instance, you can include a city name, a product size, color, or other aspects likely to be relevant. This increases your Quality Score (driving down your costs) and also helps with conversions.
Aside from using relevant keywords, you can add other copywriting elements to increase conversions on your ads. Use various call-to-action (CTA) variations and supporting copy. You never know if a particular feature could be the key to generating more clicks. In addition, make sure your headline is not just relevant but also catchy. It needs to draw attention away from all the other elements of the search engine results page.
If you need to raise brand awareness, your goals and strategy will look different. Instead of merely going for the most conversions, you are attempting to appeal to a larger target audience and bring them on a long journey.
For this strategy, you can use the Google Display Network. Expand your reach beyond the search engine results. Your ads can appear on various sites that have relevance to your market. You can combine these campaigns with other strategies like social media to create a well-rounded strategy.
As you go along, you’ll want to learn how to start a PPC campaign strategy update. You should look at a few factors consistently while coming up with new metrics that contribute to your goals. For instance:
Your cost-per-click can come down with better bid management. Avoid increasing bids on the non-brand keywords. The reason is that your competition can push rates higher, and thus your CPC will go through the roof. You want a nice balance of impression share to justify your ad spend.
There are many ways to automate your bidding using Google’s data that could prove beneficial for your campaigns. At the same time, try to customize your bids as frequently as possible to see how conditions have changed since the pandemic.
When competition is less scared to spend on ads again, your CPC is likely to rise. As the economy gets closer to normal and restrictions are lifted, expect more economic activity. This will give businesses the cash flow to invest in advertising again. You want to address your budget ranges on a consistent basis to ensure you have the right allocation for each campaign.
Remarketing can be a great investment. By showing ads to previous visitors or other relevant segments of your market, you can engage with them across multiple channels.
For instance, you can choose to display an ad for 50% off and encourage them to visit your product page once again.
Using this same ad formula, you can show ads to customers around the web on several channels.
If you are starting with a small budget, you might want to focus on direct response advertising, such as getting signups to your email list. However, if you can increase your budget beyond the basics, then branding becomes a viable strategy.
Whereas direct response ads are usually very conversion-oriented, brand campaigns involve putting your name and image before your audience multiple times. The goal is to increase awareness of and affinity for your brand.
You might find that your conversions are suffering due to your lack of proper qualifying in your campaigns.
These are some great questions to ask your market:
Ensure that you are targeting users who actively want your product or service. If your campaign goals are more long term, you can begin to show ads to a market segment shortly before entering the buying window. This will create warmer leads as future advertisements include more CTAs to drive sales and conversions.
Testing the urgency of your customer’s needs is crucial. If someone is closer to being ready for a purchase, you might want to spend more to acquire that customer. Otherwise, slowly ramping up your offer and frequency of ad placements can help you achieve lower CPCs until the time is right.
Test various colors, packages, and prices alongside one another. Try sending one version for each pain point or option to see what your market truly wants.
Try the strategies above in your next campaign. You can let your prospects tell you their answers via forms, menus, or product options on your landing page.
If you further qualify your audience by finding out exactly what they want, you can show them increasingly relevant ads and pages with each click. The result is that your PPC campaign becomes a powerful and flexible tool to attract traffic and produce conversions.
With any PPC campaign, managing your keywords is vital. You need to be able to identify your highest performing keywords that have the lowest relative cost. This allows you to reach your market more efficiently. You can use the Keyword Planner to find new keywords and then play with match types and negative keywords to lower your CPC. In the end, this aspect of your campaign is always evolving, so stay ahead of the curve.
A lot of great campaigns come from narrowing down your target market. Within your general market, you can identify your most profitable customers. Then, using the data you have, you can create a profile that represents your customer avatar.
To reach these customers, look for characteristics like:
A customer persona is very important to know in marketing. If you notice that customers who have a dog and love running buy your dog treats in large amounts and rarely ask for a refund, you can show specific ads or dedicate portions of your budget to this segment. Looking at your data allows you to create meaningful campaigns out of demographic and behavioral data instead of leaving opportunities on the table.
Don’t feel limited to old school sales funnels. Get creative with ways to drive traffic and increase conversions. Here are some examples to get you started:
Don’t forget to look at the top of your funnel for ideas. Oftentimes, combining match types with negative keywords can produce more targeted market segments. From here, you can figure out other appeals that might interest these users in an ad.
You don’t want to be one step behind the competition all the time. However, sometimes you need to research what your competitors are doing and what seems to be working. If they are running successful ads to your target market, you can analyze aspects to use in your own PPC campaigns. Keep an eye and spy on your competitor smartly.
Sometimes, you will come up with new product offerings that expand your revenue from a segment by offering customers something related to the product or service you’re already selling. In the end, they will develop brand loyalty and increase your bottom line with multiple purchases.
There is no reason not to do so with the variety of tools that exist for testing today. Take advantage of the ability to test multiple campaigns and ads at scale. For each campaign, create multiple ad sets to test each approach.
If possible, only test one element of your campaign at a time. For instance, you might run two ads simultaneously, with the only difference being the headline.
Once a clear winner emerges, you can test other elements of your ad copy or relevance in turn. Eventually, you will have optimized your ads to meet your goals in the most efficient way.
In the world of PPC marketing, brands don’t always make a profit on the front end. That is to say that there are tweaks further down the funnel that can make a big difference.
If your Google Ads are driving traffic in a profitable way, look for ways to maximize your revenue in the rest of your funnel:
Google uses the Quality Score to determine your ad rank. An essential part of this is the landing page. With relevant content, you can raise your Quality Score.
You can increase relevance with better keyword placement, more engaging content, and higher conversions on-page elements.
In addition to adjusting to the algorithm, keep the human side of things in mind. The more deeply visitors explore your website and interact with your website, the higher your conversions tend to be.
Don’t ignore the facility provided by Google Lead Form Extension. Consider changing up your lead capture forms with new copy and images. Sometimes, simple changes can produce surprising results.
OTO is a type of upselling for the age of sales funnels. You can offer a limited time offer right after your visitor reaches a crucial point in the buying journey.
Here are various places to include an OTO in your funnel:
By timing your OTO correctly, you can sell more products in the same transaction. This will increase your customer lifetime value (CLV) and allow you to bid higher in the auction.
Being able to follow up with your customers is important for repeat business and longer sales cycles. Therefore, your funnel should lead to the collection of emails, numbers, or physical addresses. If not, your entire advertising strategy is dependent on a third party.
By having direct access to your leads and customers, you can serve them better. You can offer exclusive discounts, information, and promotions with minimal cost and without the worry of your communications meeting the subjective standards of social media or other platforms.
No matter whether you run PPC campaigns for e-commerce, local services, business opportunities, or anything else, you should implement a follow-up plan with your list of contacts.
Here are some strategies that can make your brand more profitable via ongoing communication with your market:
As the world wrestles with a “new normal,” you need to adjust your Google Ads campaign strategy. The world has changed in a short amount of time. Knowing how to start a PPC campaign has never been more important.
There will be both short term challenges and long term challenges. But with those challenges comes opportunity. For intelligent advertisers who use the right strategy, a lot of new campaign angles can become profitable.
The key is to apply the advice above. Continue to adjust your goals and tactics, and test ideas consistently. Over time, you can get your brand voice and campaign strategy on target to hit your business objectives, and grow your business amid these uncertain times.
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