Today, many businesses are using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on search engines to generate more leads, sales and customers. In competitive verticals, where search engine optimization is too difficult or expensive, PPC advertising may be the only way to get on page 1 for the keywords that matter most to your business.
You can do PPC marketing on Google AdWords, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines so that your ad can appear on or near the top of the results for relevant searches.
While the process for creating the ads and signing up is fairly simple, truly knowing what to do and making the right decisions is another matter.
We are a ppc management company in New York City and we’ve worked with all sorts of companies and all sorts of budgets and we wanted to share some of the most important lessons we’ve learned about how to get more out of your PPC advertising:
- Target your advertising: A good rule of thumb is to target your advertising efforts to a certain region or group. Moz.com says that Even if what “…you sell works all over US or world, people are still more keen on a local PPC provider or at least a company that recognizes ‘their state’. …Google and other search engines allow you to geo-target your PPC ads by state.”
- Make sure you have a good landing page – Make sure if a customer does click on your ad – if your website or landing page is not well designed it can confuse the customer and you could lose business. According to Hubspot: The landing page is where you seal the deal in PPC. You can get everything else right in your (PPC) campaigns, but if you’re not building solid landing pages, you’re not going to turn those clicks into conversions.”
- Getting Rid of Fraud Networks – Make sure your ad is going to relevant and safe networks. Moz.com warns that “Every paid search engine, be it Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc, has a network to which they distribute your ads. Unfortunately, many of these networks are fraudulent and do not refer quality traffic.” That said, Moz.com recommends to look through your web analytics and look at domain names with a “high bounce rate.” Also note, that the bounce rate has to be at 90% for Google drop the fraudulent domain names into “excluded sites.”
- Don’t Forget to Sign In: HubSpot reports that “The number-one reason most businesses fail at AdWords is they don’t sign in enough. PPC managers say they are doing work in their accounts, but when…looking at the change history of the average AdWords account, the numbers tell a different story. In fact, only 1% of small businesses sign in to AdWords on a weekly basis. If you want AdWords to work for you, you have to commit to regularly logging in and actually working on your account.”
- Go Mobile – Mobile is a relatively new activity for many advertisers and as such, many do not consider that PPC advertising on mobile phones a good investment. HubSpot says that is a big mistake. Now that search engine marketing sites like Google’s AdWords is starting to create easier ways to advertise on mobile devices with enhanced tools, buying mobile easier today than ever. HubSpot says the benefits of mobile advertising are the following: “Mobile users are quicker to convert. They often want something NOW, so you need to adjust your ads (messaging, call-to-action, extensions, etc.) accordingly to secure the conversion.”
- Test multiple campaigns – A big mistake is creating one version of your ad and going with that and thus bidding only on a few keywords. It is a good practice to ascertain if your ad is going to spark interest and have a good click-through, impression and score high on search engines, is to test out a few different versions to see which ones tend to show up the most and have a positive response. This technique enables you to utilize different keywords and phrases. To help you understand the many metrics available to demonstrate the success of a PPC ad, experts advise to look at several metrics you can find on Google AdWords:
- Impressions – The number of times your ad was displayed in a search results page.
- Clicks – The number of times someone clicked on your ads.
- Click Through Rate (CTR) – The percentage of clicks divided by Impressions.
- Cost – The total cost for all clicks.
- Average Cost per Click (CPC) – Total cost divided by the total number of clicks.
- Average Position – How high in the results page is your ad showing. 1 is the highest.
- Impression Share – The percentage of the total number of times your ad could have been shown vs the actual number of times it was shown.
- Conversions – The number of times someone clicked on an ad and completed an action you defined as a conversion within a specific period of time.
- Quality Score – Relevancy of your combined keyword, ad and landing page which affects your CPC. Quality scores vary but the higher the better.