One of the most effective approaches to growing your business this year is by executing successful PPC campaigns. As a refresher, PPC stands for pay-per-click, where advertisers or businesses pay each time a user clicks on their ad. From strategizing to execution, there are a number of elements that go into ensuring a successful PPC campaign that will not only increase brand awareness, but can also potentially increase sales or generate leads.
As the year progresses, keeping a pay-per-click checklist on deck can help business owners understand and organize these elements so as to not get overwhelmed or confused. This can also be a great way to refresh the campaigns that you’re already carrying out. What worked last year might not be the same strategy that could work this year, so it’s important to double check all of your PPC campaigns to ensure that all aspects of this checklist are still working effectively for your business.
1. Identify Your PPC Goals For This Year
Before you dive into the creation process for your ads, you must first identify what goals you’re trying to achieve for your business this year through PPC campaigns. By having specific goals in mind, you can in turn have a more refined approach when creating and refining your campaigns. To put it simply, different goals will require different efforts.
Are you interested in generating more leads for your business? Do you want to increase your website traffic and brand visibility? Are you looking for a higher conversion rate of clicks to sales? Instead of starting from scratch, defining your goals will essentially be guiding your campaign in the specific direction that you want. Once you’ve established them, the process of creating the most ideal pay-per-click campaigns becomes a lot easier.
2. Identify Poor Performing Campaigns
Whether you’re starting a brand new campaign or revamping your already existing ones, finding a correlation between poor performing campaigns can give you insight into what works and what doesn’t. By looking into the analytics and data of your campaigns, you can easily identify potential factors that are hurting your goals, and pause those campaigns as necessary to keep from wasting money.
From there on, it’s just a matter of problem-solving and making the proper adjustments. For example, if you have poor quality scores or you’re not ranking well with your PPC campaigns, consider increasing your bids on keywords, whether these keywords are worth bidding on, or even make adjustments to the creative of the ad itself. This process can also help you with the creation and success of future campaigns.
3. Review and Update Audiences
To grow your business effectively with PPC campaigns, it’s important that you understand exactly who your business is targeting. Similar to identifying your PPC goals, identifying your target audiences will have a tremendous effect on the success of your pay-per-click campaigns, and can also provide insight into how your ads should be created and where they will be pushed out on.
To find out what audiences are engaging with your campaigns the most, check your demographics and geographical targeting criteria. If this data doesn’t match the audience that you’re targeting, then you need to rework your content and campaigns. By checking these analytics, you’ll also have the opportunity to add new audiences for your business based on engagement rates and who is consistently using your products or services.
4. Review Keywords
Keywords can make or break your campaign. If you’re not using the most suitable keywords for your business, then no amount of money will be able to sustain your PPC goals. Four key factors to consider when reviewing specific keywords are relevance, search volume, competition, and cost.
For example, if the keyword that you’re bidding on has nothing to do with what your business is offering, your PPC campaign won’t produce effective results. If you’re bidding on a keyword that doesn’t have a decent search volume, you could potentially rank high, but your ad and business won’t be discovered as much. Above all else, identifying your competitors can help with your PPC strategy and whether or not the cost of certain keywords are worth what your campaigns are bringing in.
5. Refresh Ads
The last thing you’d want in a pay-per-click campaign is for your ad to be outdated. Spending money on an outdated ad is not only a waste, but it can also affix an unprofessional image onto your business. When reviewing your already existing PPC campaigns, update your ad copy and imagery to ensure that the information and content being presented is still relevant for today (or for whenever you’re planning to have them go live).
For example, if your ad is promoting a spring event, make sure there aren’t any winter-related elements or images. If your ad is highlighting a special promotion, double check that the sale, offer, or any discount codes are still valid. Having effective landing pages are also important for translating clicks into sales or leads, so review this element as well.
6. Track & Modify PPC Campaigns Regularly
Once you’ve decided that your pay-per-click campaigns are ready to see the light of day, it’s just a matter of tracking and modifying. Monitoring how your ads are performing through analytics and identifying your KPI’s (key performance indicators) can help you make the proper adjustments for improving the efficiency of your campaigns throughout the year.
Remember, you’re spending valuable money on these campaigns to satisfy your business goals, so you need to be tracking them on a regular basis to ensure the best possible results. With successful campaigns, don’t hesitate to repeat the same strategy or creative process for campaigns in the future, but do make sure that you’re modifying these ads so that they’re not outdated and still as effective.
A New and Improved Campaign
With this six step checklist at your disposal, you can be confident that your pay-per-click campaigns are working effectively for the growth and success of your business. Identify your PPC goals before starting any campaign, then identify what could be improved by finding a correlation between poor performing campaigns. Review and update your audiences so that you can produce sensible and targeted ads, but also make sure that these ads are being reviewed and refreshed, from keywords to copy. At the end of the day, it all comes down to performance, and tracking this regularly can get your campaigns on a whole other level.
If you’re interested in learning more about how to deliver the most effective PPC campaigns this year, contact Lau Marketing for a consultation!