If you own a digital storefront, making sure that you’re reaching your target audience means the difference between hitting your sales goals and becoming one of the millions of ecommerce websites out there that aren’t receiving the traffic they need to realize a profit. Ecommerce has become massively popular because almost anyone can start their own store and conduct business from the comfort of their homes.
One excellent strategy when you’re looking to reach new customers and transform leads into conversions is pay-per-click advertising or PPC. PPC boosts your SEO efforts and helps find an audience for your website, increasing conversion rates.
But with all that in mind, knowing how to properly leverage a paid search strategy is critical to achieve the results you want. What do you need to do to get the most out of your PPC strategy? How can you distinguish yourself from other competitors in your space? These are our top ten ways to improve your PPC strategy!
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What Is PPC?
So, what exactly is pay-per-click advertising? Aptly named, PPC is a popular marketing tool that allows you to get your products in front of an audience by paying to have them shown alongside relevant search queries. If you’ve ever conducted an online search for a certain type of product or searched something that brought up products, you’re likely quite familiar with the PPC model on the consumer end of the spectrum already.
PPC can help you boost your pages in search engine results pages (SERPs) by using certain keywords and phrases that are relevant to your products and being researched by consumers. It’s a very popular method for helping your products gain visibility. In fact, 95% of video marketers plan to increase or maintain video spending in 2020. Why? Because 60% of mobile users click on a PPC ad at least once a week.
However, there’s a lot more that goes into pay-per-click advertising than meets the eye. If you’re looking to make the most out of PPC, there are certain considerations and important tips to guide you throughout the process.
What To Know Before Using PPC
Paid search can be an effective way to get your products in front of consumers. However, as with any other strategy leveraged in your digital marketing strategy, you need to set KPIs to properly measure, optimize, and benefit from your PPC strategy.
Before you dive into PPC any further, ask yourself, what are you aiming to accomplish with your campaigns? Are you looking to boost a specific product? Are you trying to sell multiple products? Do you want to build a larger audience for your site? Most importantly, which platforms are you going to use for your pay-per-click advertising campaign? Considering these factors is crucial to your long-term success.
Another important thing to know is that a good conversion rate is estimated to be anywhere between 2% and 5%. If your conversion rates are lower than this, you need to employ strategies to boost conversion rates.
Now that you have a better picture of what pay-per-click advertising is and what you need to know before you dive in, you need more insight into what ultimately defines a successful PPC strategy. Let’s take a closer look at 10 ways to improve your paid search strategy that will help you see the results you want.
10 Ways To Improve Your PPC Strategy
1. Automation for Each SKU
Your stock number unit (SKU) is important for many reasons. Besides helping you distinguish one product from the next, your SKU helps you track your inventory, sale prices, and more. Every product needs to be looked at individually, and each SKU should have individual auto campaigns, allowing you to see how each product is performing.
Keeping close tabs on all of the products in your pay-per-click advertising strategy will play a major role in your success over time. Now is the time to establish a foundation and make sure that you’re doing everything right to avoid potential obstacles in the future. While you can always readjust, doing things improperly only causes complications that can be detrimental to your business.
2. Manual Keyword Targeting Campaign
SEO and other digital marketing strategies like PPC tend to overlap, and this is certainly the case when it comes to keywords. When you’re establishing your paid search strategy, set your own keywords so that you can personalize your campaigns. As with any search query conducted in a search engine, having the right keywords will direct consumers to your products. Manual campaigns will allow you to be more precise with your ads, giving you more control over your product’s image and helping to boost the visibility of specific products. This will be a tremendous help for your pay-per-click advertising strategy.
3. Knowing the Right Keywords
Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) is a great way to boost your advertising campaign. By inserting specific keywords into your ad copy, you are not only customizing the campaign but creating a brand that customers are looking for.
The good news is that DKI is an advanced feature that uses machine learning or AI to update the text based on users’ search queries, making it easier for you to reach the customers you want. There’s some work that still takes place on your end, but it’s a helpful feature that allows you to better tailor your ads to get the most out of your pay-per-click advertising strategy. Just be careful to avoid search terms that are too broad, because it can make your ads difficult for customers to find when they’re conducting relevant searches.
4. Video Ads
Have you ever looked at a wall of text, only to find it unengaging and difficult to focus on? In today’s world, people love visual content. While text helps you tap into Google’s algorithm to take advantage of SEO and paid search allows you to get in front of customers, the presentation of your ads plays a vital role in how users engage with your products.
Visuals such as video ads are a great way to attract potential customers in your pay-per-click advertising campaigns because they’re often much more appealing, informative, and fun. Incorporate videos into your ads to see better results in your campaign!
5. Keeping Mobile PPC in Mind
When you’re marketing online, your website will reach a large number of devices that vary greatly. If you’re not creating your website, content, and ads for these other devices, you’re essentially missing out on these customers. This applies to those who have websites that function perfectly on desktop but are slow, difficult to navigate, or buggy on mobile.
Having mobile-friendly pay-per-click advertising campaigns will help you reach customers and increase conversions. Much of today’s shopping occurs through mobile devices, and having a mobile-friendly website and PPC ads will help you reach these buyers to take advantage of this massive consumer base. While the work you do may be conducted on a laptop or a desktop computer, the world today runs on mobile, and everything that you produce for your marketing needs has to be able to run on mobile, too.
6. Closed-Loop Revenue Attribution
Have you ever established a digital marketing campaign but failed to analyze the results to see which strategies are failing and which are thriving? Of course not! As a business owner, understanding the effectiveness of the different strategies you employ is the only way to properly optimize them so that you can achieve better results over time. Closed-loop revenue attribution helps you achieve this with pay-per-click advertising.
Focus on your revenue, and see if your leads result in sales or not. Each campaign results in different amounts of revenue, and it’s important to understand what’s working and what’s not in your paid search campaigns. Without these insights, you’ll find it extremely difficult to make improvements that will help you see greater conversions.
7. Staying Up-To-Date
No business owner is ever done learning. Things are always changing in business, especially when it comes to PPC features that are being implemented by Google. Make it a priority to regularly review new pay-per-click advertising features, do your research to better understand what type of impact they have and how they can be properly leveraged, and what you need to do to optimize your current campaign to meet the needs of your audience. Google Ads is constantly updating its features, and you need to keep up with them to get the best possible results!
8. Targeting Audiences
Knowing your audience is crucial to building campaigns that will attract more customers.
It will also help you when you are building your campaigns and inspiring your work. Set aside some time to conduct audience research so that you can properly target them. What are they looking for? What types of keywords are they searching for? What language appeals most to them? What type of content is most effective in encouraging them to make a purchase? The more you know about your target audience, the easier pay-per-click advertising, and marketing in general, will be.
9. PPC Ad Copy
Your ad copy needs to be of the highest quality, effectively appealing to your audience and convincing them to purchase your products. Strong ad copy is direct, succinct, powerful, and engaging. All of your ads should feel like they’re personally tailored to the user. After all, while you’re trying to reach all of your audience, you want them to feel as though you’re appealing to them on a personal level in your pay-per-click advertising campaigns.
10. Bid Adjustments
A big part of paid search is personalization. Having the power to control your PPC campaign helps you achieve better results. Bid adjustments are one area to focus on. Bid adjustments allow you to increase or decrease your bids depending on how well a certain campaign is doing. This helps you adjust the frequency with which ads are displayed and gives you more control over your work.
PPC Advertising Is Extensive, but Coalition Technologies Makes It Simpler
Pay-per-click advertising is a great way to help your products become visible, but there’s a lot that goes into it. PPC best practices require you to understand your audience and how to create a successful campaign, regularly observe and analyze your campaign to understand their performance and what needs to be done to see better results, and build a loyal customer base over time. However, while PPC may be extensive, it’s certainly not something you have to tackle alone.
We here at Coalition Technologies are the best digital marketing agency in the world, specializing in PPC, SEO, and beyond. With extensive case studies to better understand our work and support through every step of the process, launching a pay-per-click advertising campaign that gets you the conversions you want is simple. Visit our website to learn more about how we help businesses with PPC or contact us now so that we can learn more about how we can support your business!
