A well-managed pay-per-click (PPC) campaign will help your ad attract clicks, and potential clients.
Some things are really great if done right, or really awful if done wrong—breakfast sandwiches, Tim Burton movies, or —most importantly— your pay-per-click (PPC) campaign. Here are five tips to improving your PPC.
1. Use negative keywords
Negative keywords refers to when you want to omit a keyword from triggering your PPC ad to display. For example, if you sell men’s dress shoes but not men’s running shoes, you’d want to include “running” as a negative keyword. This will save you money and increase the likelihood that people who do click on your ad will genuinely be interested in what you’re selling.
2. Know How to Use Broad, Exact and Phrase Matches
Broad matches refer to when a user searches and uses synonyms or other relevant words. Although this can be helpful for certain synonym matches depending on what you offer, it can also cause bad matches if not managed properly, which wastes your advertising budget.
Broad matches may have the most room for misuse of any kind of matches. If your broad matches are applied too broadly, you’ll show up for irrelevant or nearly irrelevant searches that are unlikely to result in a conversion. If your PPC is set to broad matches and isn’t managed well, you’re losing money and risk hurting your reputation. For example, if someone searches “dog bite attorney,” a mismanaged PPC campaign could cause the term “attorney” to trigger showing your PPC ad even if your firm doesn’t handle dog bite injury cases. Your advertising budget is being wasted if the user clicks on your ad.
In some cases, your PPC ad may not direct users to the appropriate page. Continuing our “dog bite attorney” example, if your PPC ad sends people to a specific page, such as your medical defects practice area page, then the user searching for a dog bite attorney will have a bad impression of your business, hurting more than your PPC budget.
Exact match for your PPC ads will make your ads only show when someone uses the exact keyword as the keyword you’ve bid on. For example, if someone searches “beef jerky store,” your ad will only come up if you’ve bid on “beef jerky store.” Generally, if a user searches a specific keyword and your ad matches that specific keyword, then your ad is more likely to result in the desired action.
Phrase matches make your PPC ads display when someone searches using a phrase that includes your keyword. For example, if your PPC targeted keyword is “tennis shoes,” and someone searches “where can I buy tennis shoes,” your PPC ad will show. Phrase matches can help account for the different ways people search.
3. Group Your Keywords
A good PPC campaign will have keywords grouped with similar keywords to ensure the right PPC ad is displayed. Grouping keywords makes it more likely that people who click on your ads are a good match for your products or services. In turn, this increases the likelihood that the people who do click on your ads will actually do what you want them to do. Grouping keywords makes your PPC spending more efficient.
4. React
What’s great about Internet marketing is that if an ad doesn’t produce good results then the strategy and copy can be changed relatively quickly. If your targeted keyword hasn’t been successful, try changing your match settings to allow for more or less specific keyword matches, or try targeting different keywords. Of course, you shouldn’t be too hasty to make changes, and your changes should be supported by data analysis.
5. Pair PPC With SEO
Having a strong presence on Google’s organic search results, which refers to the unpaid Google listings, coupled with a PPC presence gives users the impression that you’re a trusted and quality company. Simply by occupying more space on Google’s first page you increase your chances of converting visitors into clients or customers. Also, some search users are more likely to click on paid listings, whereas others are skeptical of PPC listings. A comprehensive, effective marketing strategy includes a well-managed PPC campaign and a company site that’s designed with search engine optimization (SEO) considerations.
What to Do to Improve Your PPC Advertising
ACS’s PPC campaign experts have helped clients significantly increase leads and site traffic.
Contact us today to get the most out of your advertising budget with our internet marketing services.