PPC (pay-per-click) marketing is a great way to drive specific, high-intent, traffic to your website quickly. It does, however, require constant optimising and refining to ensure you’re getting the best results possible within your budget.
It’s obviously important not to spend money on clicks that aren’t relevant to your business, but how can you make sure the clicks you receive are relevant? What can you do to improve your PPC campaigns for the year ahead?
Below you will find five of the most impactful and quick-to-implement changes you can make in Google Ads to supercharge your campaigns and achieve the results you want.
Conduct detailed keyword research
If you’re familiar with the old adage “one cannot step into the same river twice,” you’ll know that a successful PPC campaign requires more than just one round of keyword research. You should be constantly reviewing and updating your keywords – because everything changes over time.
Those same changes are true for people’s search habits and terminology. Words commonly used today might vanish overnight, and our preference for convenient technology is driving mobile traffic upwards, altering the way we search for things.
By changing your PPC campaigns, you can be primed to discover new traffic sources from new keywords. Your observance might also ensure you are the first to notice upcoming product or service trends, giving you an edge over your competition.
Speaking of competition, the keyword research report in Google Ads features a competition rating. By observing this rating over a number of months, you can start to see which keywords have the most competition and – most importantly – find keywords where competition (and thus the cost-per-click) is lower for you to take advantage of.
Optimise your landing page
It’s a common misconception that a PPC marketer’s job ends when someone clicks on their ad. In fact, your landing page and the experience it provides to the customer are both critical factors in driving success.
To illustrate its importance, the landing page experience is one of the three variables Google uses when ranking your keywords, before providing a “quality score”. As a result, a poor user experience can result in a poor quality score – meaning a lower position for your ad, and an increased cost-per click.
To optimise your PPC landing page, here are a few key things to look out for:
Ensure headlines & CTAs match your offer
The proposition that your visitor receives when they arrive on your landing page should be similar to the offer in your ad. This helps to synchronise the customer journey, and enables you to back up and provide more detail on your USPs.
Use feature images
Visuals, such as images and videos, are great at encouraging customers or potential new clients to move towards your CTA. Use these elements as a way to guide customers through the conversion process and help them to navigate the website, whilst also showing off your products and services.
Reinforce trust
It’s unlikely that visitors coming from your paid ads will know who you are. That’s why it’s important to set their mind at ease by proving that you are a trustworthy and credible business. One of the best ways to demonstrate your reliability is to feature third-party reviews and company testimonials. Try testing different combinations of both to see what works best for your business.
We should also mention your visitor’s mobile landing page experience, which is too often overlooked in favour of desktop devices despite the fact that mobile accounts for 45% of all UK online traffic. That number is only going to get higher, so it’s important to ensure your website is mobile-friendly, and set up to serve customers on whatever device they prefer to use.
Make a list of negative keywords
Another often overlooked part of Google Ads is having and maintaining a strong negative keyword list for your campaigns. That list is a crucial way for marketers to refine their traffic, especially for Google Shopping campaigns, in which keywords are based on a product feed and not explicitly chosen.
When it comes to maintaining a negative keyword list, consider adding the following:
- Irrelevant keywords;
- Non-converting keywords; and
- Keywords picked up in keyword research.
Don’t be afraid to use phrase-match and broad-match negatives in a campaign either. Both of these keyword classifications can provide efficient ways to filter out some of the irrelevant longer-tail traffic that you may not have picked up in search reports or keyword research.
For example, if you’re an e-commerce website selling high-end fashion items, you could add the broad negative keyword “cheap” to ensure your ads do not show when people are clearly searching for low-price point-products.
Test your ad copy
Ad copy testing is another vital part of any PPC campaign. Put simply, this helps to increase both your click-through-rate percentage (CTR%) and conversion rate by sourcing content that engages and resonates with your target audience.
To get the most out of your testing, you should first create a testing plan containing all the elements you want to test, and what your main KPIs are. We would also recommend including a section to record your results.
When compiling a list of the elements to test, start with the ones you think will work best with your audience. You should also make sure you’re running the tests long enough to receive some meaningful results (a minimum of 1,000 impressions is a good goal).
To get you started, here are a few ad copy variables that have provided our clients with significant success:
- Dynamic keyword insertion (DKI’s);
- Including social proof;
- Reinforcing trust with third party reviews;
- Communicating your core USPs; and
- Using emojis to stand out.
- Provide ad extensions/assets
Ad extensions (now known as ad assets) are the additional pieces of business information that can be tagged onto your ads. In a world where our headlines are confined to just 30 characters, ad extensions help to provide additional real estate for us to highlight our business USPs, often resulting in a higher CTR %.
For each auction, Google determines which assets will be shown to the customer. To make sure all of your assets are available if Google decides to show them, we would always recommend (where compatible with your business goals) adding all available assets to a campaign.
Below are some of the most important assets and extensions to add. To guide you on your way, we’ve included what we think they’re best used for:
Sitelinks – Clickable links that take your customers to other areas of your website that you want to highlight. These are great if your business has multiple services that sit on different landing pages because you can showcase them all in one place.
Callouts – These are small phrases added to the end of the ad description that are great for showcasing your company USPs, and what puts you above your competitors. Statements like “Free Delivery” or “Online Chat Support” are great ways to stand out.
Calls – Call extensions are great for B2B campaigns looking to generate leads. They are most suitable for these campaigns because they provide a clear and clickable contact route for a customer to follow.
Images – One of the newest forms of ad extension, image extensions are great for e-commerce stores with visually appealing products on sale. They help to extend the overall size of your ad, really making it stand out next to your competitors, especially if they don’t have any images on their ads.
To under-optimise your PPC campaign is to miss out on a golden marketing opportunity. By following our five steps of improvement, you can cost-effectively reach out to specific audiences, and do a better job tracking their behaviour.
Still need convincing? Here’s an ad you won’t have to pay for. Get in touch for a free quote today, and make 2024 the year you take your marketing to the next level.