It’s a common phenomenon among business owners and marketers alike — they get enthused by the idea of running a PPC ad campaign. So they rush to give it try. Only to quickly throw up their hands in pure defeat immediately their budget runs dry and they’ve got nothing to show for it.
The idea of running a paid search campaign is never one you’d want to gloss over. Simple: you pull together a paid search campaign and then proceed to fund it. The next thing you know is the campaign attracting scores of high quality traffic directly to your website, and conversion ensues.
This is the ideal idea of PPC ads in theory form. But in reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Which is to say, running a successful PPC campaign requires extensive knowledge on the undercurrents behinds it. That should be followed by thorough testing and a proper execution plan.
In other words, running a successful PPC ad is for the most part dependent on the finer details marketers and web owners overlook all the time or are NOT even aware of. Suffice it to say that it’s the small changes you make on your ad copy that make all the difference between running a successful AdWords campaign and wasting your resources on a misfired one.
Real-Time Example
Imagine a scenario where you’re running a PPC ad that’s averaging a CPC of $1. By making a slight adjustment to your ad copy and landing pages, it’s possible to attain a higher quality score. And, in addition to being awarded a higher ad position, it’s also possible to drop the average CPC for the ad campaign further down.
Assuming you drop it to, say, $0.5. You’d have doubled the number of visitors you drive to your site, thus doubling the number of sales you make, as well.
In other words, if you’re running the campaign on a $100 budget, you’ll be approximately driving 100 visitors to your website at the initial CPC. But when the CPC drops to $0.5, then the number shoots up to 200 visitors, a double of the number you were initially attracting.
The difference becomes even bigger when you’re operating on an even bigger budget. With $100, 000, the initial CPC would result in 100, 000 visitors. However, after the CPC drops, the number shoots up to 200, 000 visitors, and the difference is super huge.
Goes to show how small changes lead to big differences that can either make or break your business.
Tips on How to Improve the Quality of Your PPC Ads
Track Everything
One good thing with PPC ads is that it allows you track every single one of the penny that you pumped into the campaign. It’s possible to tell how you’re spending your ad money. Also by integrating it with the conversion tracking system, it’s possible to tell the amount of revenue you’re generating through the campaign.
The tracking even goes a step further by looking at the keywords you’re using and which one among them is generating the best results.
In other words, there’s NO limit as to what you can track and improve for better conversion results and quality leads.
Go ahead and track everything right from the onset. A common mistake business owners make all the time is running the campaigns blindly. They don’t take time to look into the campaign data and come up with different ways on how to improve it for better performance in future. There’s no shortcut to it – running a successful PPC ad campaign entails tracking and analyzing the results coming in every step of the way and making necessary adjustments where necessary for better campaign results.
Small changes in PPC have a huge impact in improving the overall performance of your ad campaign. The point is to keep on working on lowering your CPC by constantly working on improving your CTRs and quality score right from the very beginning of running your ad campaign.
Run PPC in tandem with SEO
Running PPC alone is never healthy for businesses. If you can’t find an effective way to combine it with SEO, then the online marketing strategy you’ve employed will be far from sound. To begin with, you want to combine the two to stand a chance of dominating the top spots of search engines, both in organic results and paid searches.
It’s been reported that having a strong presence in both fields increases the odds of a prospect clicking through your link to check out your brand. Even better, it establishes your brand as the industry leader or the most influential force within the field you’re in.
You also want to make sure that you’re covering all areas, considering some of the customers you get will be attracting organic results more while there’s some who’d prefer to click on paid searches. So by covering both fields, you’ll be increasing the likelihood that the bulk of the users you attract will be clicking on your links provided to check you out.
The point is to make sure you’re covering much of the search results as it’s naturally possible. Where possible, make sure you have a paid search at the top, a top list in the SERPs, your brand information on the right-hand sidebar.
Optimize Your Landing Page
Directing a good number of Google users to your site is never enough if the bulk of the visitors that trickle in aren’t taking any action.
The first thing you do when evaluating your PPC campaign is conduct a PPC audit. Go through the campaign and optimize it accordingly, dropping the CPC where necessary and improving on the quality score.
For what’s worth, a quality score is the numeric value ranging from 1 to 10 that Google assigns to every single one of the keywords that you run in a PPC ad campaign. A good quality score works in favour of the underlying ad campaigner by ranking their sites on the crest of search engines. But first, search engine have to establish that they’re directing the traffic you attract to relevant landing pages.
Quality Scores and What Role do they play in Your PPC Campaign?
As the name suggests, a quality score simply determines the quality of the Ad you’re running. It does this by looking at how relevant it is with regards to what a Google search user is interested in.
The score can take any value from a range of 1 to 10, where 1 is the lowest score you can get while 10 is the highest score you’ll ever be awarded by Google. To determine the score, Google will be looking at the relevancy of your selected list of keywords in comparison to the search term queried in by the corresponding user. They’ll also weigh the relevancy of the ad copy and that of the landing page before determining the score.
So as a marketer, your job is to always aim for the highest score. You can do this by aiming for the most relevant list of keywords and making some serious adjustments to the overall configuration of your ad campaign.
The point is to keep on working on improving your quality score. That way, your ad will be displayed more frequently in addition to lowering your CPC. So how can you improve your quality score?
Well, read on to find out:
- Go back to your ad copy and make sure that it snugly describes the type of product or service you’re trying to advertise. It’s crucial to ensure that you’ve used all the relevant keywords in both the headline and the ad copy itself.
Also, consider creating several ads while customizing every single one of the ads to specifically target one particular keyword. Do this for all the keywords within your list and get to improve your quality score for almost every single one of them.
- Now shift your attention to your landing page. Go through the content in the landing page and make sure that it relates to the ad copy you created and every single one of the products you’re advertising.
Where you’re running a different ad copy for every single one of the product or services you’re selling or offering, you might want to consider creating several landing pages for each one of the ad copy you create.
And while writing the content on your landing page, make sure it’s directly engaging with the target user. Be strategic with how you create your landing page because you’d want to make sure that the content you’ve created appears on that particular landing page.
Needless to say, the content must also gel well with the ad copy you create for the ad to be awarded with a higher quality score.
- Run a Google Page Speed Test. This is done to ensure that your page’s load time is acceptable as per the recent load-time standards as laid down by Google. If it happens that your site loads up a bit slowly, then you have no option but to come up with a way to speed it up.
Come to think of it, a slow loading site provides a bad user experience that could result in a higher bounce rate. So it behooves Google search to favour sites with impressive loading speeds.
- Head over to Google Analytics page and take a sweeping glance at your site’s bounce rate. If by any chance your site has a higher bounce rate, then that’s goes on to show that there’s something lackluster about it or your overall marketing strategy.
It could be that it loads like molasses. Or users are having a hard time finding their way around it. Or that users aren’t finding what they’re looking for.
Whatever the problem, you want to make sure that your site’s visitors hang around for a little bit longer. That will ensure that you stand a better chance of converting the bulk of the visitors you attract to your site into buying customers.
Learn to Leverage Ad Extensions and Site Links
Site links allow you to integrate additional call to actions directly to your ad copy. With this you can go ahead and experiment with different call to actions in order to find out which one among them attracts the highest number of users or gets the most click-through’s.
And as you’re soon to find out, the more you scale up your ad campaign, the more every little improvement you make on your ad copy generates a greater impact with regards to the overall amount of money you spend on the ad.
By including site links and ad extensions into your ad copy, there’s a fair chance that you’ll be increasing the number of clicks your ad copy attracts. That’s mostly because users are presented with more choices, which entices even more of them to take action.
So in a way, you’d want to include ad extensions and site links for the sake of dramatically increasing your click through rate and ramp up the amount of traffic you’re driving to your site or landing page.
Increase Your PPC Budget and Grow
Don’t skimp on the amount of money you set aside for PPC ads. If after going through your ad campaign and analyzing it, you found out that it was generating some ROI. Then why NOT scale it up?
Don’t take a frog leap while at it. Instead, learn to adjust it slowly by slowly until you’ve done your math. From there you can go ahead and turn up the budget for an even greater revenue stream.
PPC is one of the best digital marketing strategy, and that’s mostly because it’s both measurable and extremely easy to scale.
Don’t let the fear of spending on the ad rob you the chance to grow. Take your time to go through the numbers you got and find out if there’s any possibility to rack up more sales should you decide to go ahead and increase your PPC budget.
Assuming you’re running the campaign at a budget of $1000. If your CPC is $1, then the campaign is likely to attract about 1000 visits. Now, assuming you have a conversion rate of 1% with a revenue rate of $600 per conversion.
Meaning, the ad campaign will be attracting 10 conversions, which in the end translates to about $6000 of revenue.
Now increase your PPC ad budget to $10, 000, and you’ll be attracting 10, 000 visits to your landing page, which in the end translates to $60, 000 of revenue.
Goes to show how easy it is for you to boost your revenue and ROI with PPC ad campaigns. All you have to do is do some little bit of math in a bid to find out if there’s a chance for growth just in case you decide to increase your PPC budget.
Let’s wrap it all Up Here
PPC ads are effective for attracting high quality leads. However, many businesses in Singapore struggle with generating business opportunities and driving positive return on investment through the PPC ad campaigns they run.
These simple strategies are meant to help you create targeted ad campaigns that are well optimized for high quality leads and conversion in addition to boosting your business bottom line.
For further help and clarifications regarding PPC ads, you’re kindly asked to make a point of reaching out to MediaOne today with your query and their customer relation team will be glad to assist you where possible.
