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2,364 viewsWould you pay 1 dollar to get 4 in return? That’s what PPC done right can do. With a highly targeted campaign focused on your best products, there’s no stopping you from achieving massive profits through PPC.
But there’s a downside as well. PPC costs money. Just as easy as it is to reap the profits, you also stand the chance of losing your entire investment if you don’t know what you’re doing. Researching proper PPC techniques is essential, especially if you’re on a tight budget.
If money is tight and you want to maximize your success at a positive ROI from PPC ads, here are some simple tips you need to follow.
1.Choose your best products or services for creating a campaign
Without proper planning, your PPC campaign is doomed to failure. Part of the planning phase includes deciding which products and services you want to advertise through PPC. But what do you do when you have hundreds of products and an amazing array of services?
Here are some questions you can ask yourself when choosing what to advertise.
What product or service is the most popular?
Which of my products or services has the highest profit margin?
For services, which ones do I knock out of the park?
What are my ‘bread and butter’ products or services?
The core metric in any PPC campaign is how much you’re paying per conversion versus how much money you get from that conversion. If you are spending more than you are making, your business will fail. If you are getting more than the campaign is succeeding. All other metrics are just details on this one metric. Therefore, you need to choose the right things to advertise from the start.
After you know which products and services that you’re going to offer your readers, then it’s time to take the next step.
2. Understand your ad network
Every PPC ad network has its quirks. To thrive, it’s necessary to get an understanding of what kinds of ads do best and where they’re best placed. Are you going to have simple text ads or are you going to have display ads? How about the Google shopping ads that rely on a combination of both?
Choosing the kind of ads you’ll run will depend on your budget and what your audience best responds to. If you’re low on money, it’s better to use text ads. Once those are effective, it’s pretty easy to move into video or pictorial ads. Plus, you’ll have some valuable marketing data from the text ads.
Never put your products on more than one ad network until you have strong success with your first choice. Also, be prepared to stick with your chosen PPC network for a few months. Good PPC takes constant tweaking and there are many factors. Don’t give up too early.
3.Geo Target your ads
For those fighting on the local front, ad targeting is crucial. Unless otherwise specified, your PPC ad is going to be broadcast to their entire network. This means that if you’re a dentist in Sacramento, you’re going to be sending ads for your painless dentistry to people in Chicago, Raleigh, and Atlanta unless you specify where you want your ad to be shown. This is geographic targeting, or geotargeting. Fortunately, it’s very easy to geo target your ads. With just a few clicks, you can match your advertisements to the city that you’re targeting.
Setting a target will pare down the number of clicks that you’re receiving, which is great if you’re on a budget. Also, the clicks that you do receive will be much more qualified. Wouldn’t you rather pay to have 100 people who are very interested in your offer or pay for 1,000 who are indifferent?
If you’re a local business, there’s no good reason not to use geo targeting. Turn it on.
4. Use exact match keywords.
The difference between exact match and broad match keywords is night and day in ad costs. When you use broad match, the ad network will display your advertisement to more people but it will be very lenient about the keyword phrases that it uses. For the exact match, the ad will display only to those who are searching for your specific long-tail keyword set.
The biggest effect that this will have on your campaign is that your impressions will drop significantly if you’re used to broad match results. However, you will most likely raise your CTR because the ad is specifically targeted to your audience. Broad match is a money loser unless you’re a national brand that wants as much exposure as possible. Stick with the exact match.
5. Implement ad extensions
There is no cost for implementing Google Adwords extensions. Extensions provide your potential customers with more information about your company, including address, phone number, reviews, and more. Because they give your listing more information, they give your ad more visibility. By extension (no pun intended), having more visibility means that there is more of a chance that your users will click on the ad.
According to Google, your ad may not display its extensions in every instance. The algorithm makes the determination based on whether it believes your performance will be improved and that your ads position and ad rank is high enough for your extensions to show. Here are some pointers from Google in making sure that your Adwords extensions show.
6. Institute Tracking Measures
If you’re not tracking your campaigns, you’re missing out. It’s like throwing a bowling ball out onto the lane and then not looking to see if you nailed any pins. AdWords lets you track everything from individual clicks to in-app actions to app installs. Not taking advantage of these features is ill-advised. If you know your numbers, you can track ROI.
One of the hardest lessons to learn when going into digital marketing is that there is no ‘fire and forget’ mechanism. There are no successful marketers out there who were willing to simply set up a small campaign and let it blindly run. If the goal is to get conversions, you’re wasting money if you don’t check in, tweak, and adjust your PPC campaign regularly.
We check the performance of our PPC campaigns in very short intervals. We allow the campaign to go 100 clicks or a couple of weeks, then judge the performance and adjust accordingly. This lets us try many things without spending too much extra money. With each iteration, we’re edging toward ever higher conversion rates.
7. Your gut is wrong. Data is king
You may have a gut instinct about how this campaign or that campaign will perform. The problem with relying on your gut is that it will always lose out to those who rely on the data that they see. If you find that there is a PPC campaign tanking and you believe that it will do better based on a gut feeling, this is simply throwing money down the drain.
Take time out of your day to check the analytics and investigate whether your money is being well spent. If you’re relying on an outside firm to run your marketing campaign, ask them more questions about what they’re doing to tweak the results that they’re getting, and how often they look at the data. Many firms will offer information about your campaigns every week, just so you can get in inside view.
If you’re on a tight budget, it’s always best to run several tests and constantly be tweaking your campaign. By keeping track of everything with your PPC campaign or a PPC Company, you can maximize your conversions and achieve the most ROI. Getting an amazing conversion rate is not out of reach, even if you’re on a budget. Try these tips out and see for yourself.
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