3 Tips for Having High-Converting PPC Campaigns
If done right, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) can turn your company from a virtual ghost town to a thriving business where customers come and go, and profits keep growing. However, the secret to PPC success won’t be cracked by just choosing some keywords, throwing together an ad, setting up a budget, and sending visitors to your website. You need a strategy that will keep costs down and conversion rates high.
The most important aspect of any PPC campaign is relevance. Your ad needs to be relevant to the keywords and audience you are targeting. Your landing page needs to be relevant to the ad copy. Your offer needs to be relevant to your landing page. Here are some additional tips that will help you out in your PPC campaigns.
Dig in Deep to Find Your Keywords
How do you go about researching your keywords? Most people enter a general term into the Keyword Planner and go with whatever suggestions Google brings them. However, there are many problems with this. The first is that Google shows the same results to everyone. So yes, your competitors are being shown the same keyword suggestions that you are. Additionally, the suggestions are usually too short, too broad, too general and too competitive.
You want to drill down and find long-tail keywords that have a lower competition but still have high monthly search volumes. You also want keywords that aren’t too short; you want specific keywords that fit your target audience to the tee.
To do this, go to the Keyword Planner and enter a URL in the landing page field. The tool will then bring up keywords based on the landing page that you entered. But you don’t have to enter your own landing page! A cool hack is to enter a URL of your competitor or another popular blog in your niche market. The tool will bring up suggestions that your competitors likely are NOT using, which means lower competition and lower costs for you!
Beware of Broad Keyword Matches and Large Ad Groups
Broad keyword matches have their place, especially if you are a large corporation with a huge budget to spend. But if you want to be cost effective and drive targeted relevant PPC traffic, then you might want to consider only using “exact” or “phrase” matches.
Choosing broad keyword matches will cause your ads to be shown to people who may not have any interest at all in what you have to offer. The whole purpose of using long-tail keywords is the targeted traffic it will bring you; using broad matches just defeats this purpose.
Why is this so important? The answer is simple: If your ad is being shown only to our target audience, the people who are interested in your services, they will be more likely to be intrigued by the ad and click on it. If your ad is being shown to people who it’s not that relevant to (which will happen if you choose broad keyword matches), you will get a lower click-through rate. Lower click-through rates lead to higher costs — if fewer people are clicking on your ad, Google will charge you more per click. This is why it’s so important that the ad copy is relevant to the keywords you are using. This is also why you should create separate ad copies for search engine ads and display ads.
For the same reason, it’s a good idea not to put unrelated keywords into one ad group. Your ad groups should be as clustered and as small as possible; only include keywords that are highly relevant to each other. This way, you’ll be able to create an ad copy that is relevant to all of its keywords.
Don’t Send Your Visitors to Your Homepage
Finally, you need your landing page to be relevant to the keyword and ad copy your visitors are coming from. If they are going to your homepage, you’ll have a low conversion rate. You need to send them to a landing page that is relevant to the ad, with a clear call-to-actions. Your landing page should also be optimized for mobile.
Contact Us
Are you wondering about how PPC advertising can help your business? Do you have any other questions about digital marketing or want to find out more about the services we offer? Don’t hesitate to contact us or call us at 215-393-8700, one of our knowledgeable team members will be more than happy to help!