A typical PPC campaign will earn you an ROI at 2:1 ratio against the expense, i.e., $2 for every $1 invested. But there’s no stopping you from creating, implementing, and optimizing the best PPC strategies for increased income, traffic, and brand recognition.
Amidst the ongoing war of ad space acquisition and increasing budget on paid advertising, learning how to do PPC campaign for optimum results is the real deal.
How to do PPC campaign?
Companies worldwide are increasingly investing in search advertising to acquire additional traffic, leads, and the revenues. But does this mean small businesses and startups should start spending all their marketing budget on paid search?
The best tactic is to use search advertising alongside organic marketing. Organic search will help you acquire traction, while its paid counterpart will bring sales.
According to Google, companies on an average receive $2 for every $1 invested in paid marketing, commonly termed as Google Ads.
However, building top pay per click campaigns isn’t an overnight job. Best PPC strategies rely on appropriate planning, implementation, and optimization to get the most out of paid ad campaigns.
Related content: Amazon PPC Guide—Strategies and Tips to Run Great Ad Campaigns
On the other hand, without a proper planning, you’re running the risk of spending your money reactively with no guarantee of an expected ROI. And creating and optimizing a targeted, goal-oriented ad campaign is the goal here.
The entire strategy creation process is divided in 3 phases: planning, implementing and optimizing. Each representing an essential part for your overall paid marketing goals.
If you’re to learn how to do PPC campaign and build a top, reliable PPC strategy for your Google Ads auction bidding. These are the steps I recommend you follow.
Planning—start the brainstorm game
Unfortunately, the foremost, yet the most overlooked phase, understanding how to do PPC campaign isn’t going to fare well unless you lay down the essential benchmarks and competitive analysis for your campaign.
Define your goals and budget
It doesn’t necessarily mean that paid advertising is solely done to generate revenue. But boosting growth in terms of additional traffic, leads, and even driving conversions through organic channels can also be considered.
How to do PPC campaign comes down to one major question.
How to decide what is your goal from your PPC strategy?
Initially, ensure that your PPC objectives are affirmed by your brand’s grand digital marketing strategy. For example, if your core objective for Q1 2021 is to increase your website traffic, then your entire campaign should revolve around increasing the ad copy’s CTR.
Once you have the goal on paper, it will be easier for you to devise the roadmap and activities to achieve that goal.
At the same time, make sure your organic marketing milestones aren’t hindering your paid marketing goals in any way. Here are the steps to follow:
- Determine the number and type of organic keywords that you want to push through paid advertising too.
- You need to see what share of your organic keywords, already ranked, can be further complemented with paid search as well.
- Watch out the keywords your competitors are using.
- Examine the keywords that are already producing good traffic figures for your website before adding them for your PPC campaigns.
- Define your KPIs, for instance, if your campaign’s goals is to generate leads, you need to calculate the number of marketing or sales qualified prospects acquired against the cost of each lead generated. (activate the conversion tracking feature in Google Ads)
- Calculate your budget—how many keywords you plan to bid for and how many clicks are practically possible from each. (there are plenty of factors affecting the number of clicks such as quality of ad copy, the relevance of your landing page with your targeted search queries, the level of competitor bidding, and the fraction of users clicking paid ads.)
- Last, identify the breakeven point when your paid campaign starts producing an ROI that covers your investment. (if you fail to reach the expected breakeven, you may need to revise your PPC strategy)
Evaluate the competitive landscape
You aren’t the only one mastering how to do PPC campaign, but so are your competitors as well.
You need to see who your direct competitors are, what they are doing with their campaigns, and at what level you need to work to compete with their PPC campaigns.
Use any paid tool like, SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc. to find who are your main competitors. Consider we’re examining an app development company, like CMOLDS, through SEMrush. Follow the navigation path on the dashboard.
Competitive Research > Advertising Research
The feature enlists the competitors fighting to acquire the company’s audience, and the paid keywords your competitors are ranking for.
By bidding on paid keywords, you can also uplift your organic keywords in your SEO efforts. (a separate topic to debate on itself)
Research keywords
Paid or organic, all searches start with any keyword research tool. In case of SEMrush, follow SEO > Keyword Magic Tool, to conduct a user-based keyword research for your PPC strategy.
Here you have created a list of your competitors’ keywords.
However, moving away from your tool, you can also brainstorm broad keyword terms surrounding your product features and associated details.
Let suppose you’re operating a content marketing business. You can start with a broad search query such as “content marketing”.
Then you can use any keyword research tool to dig associated keywords, phrase matches, exact matches, questions, and so on.
If you have installed the search bar in your website, extract all the searches done in the last 60 or 90 days and then sort out according to their types.
The idea is to see terms that people search about on your site. These search queries might hold the potential to create content for paid advertising campaigns and answer the user’s search intent.
Last, open your Google Search Console and determine your existing organic keywords with a high CTR.
These keywords might have equally high CTRs suited for paid marketing too. Choosing and working on these keywords can improve your Google Ads Quality Score as well.
Execution—write and build
Now comes the game time! Start executing all the things you’ve planned.
Set up your Google account in order to define your campaigns and ad groups.
Determine your account structure
Often accounts are set up with broad campaigns alongside a set of few ad groups. The budget will be set at campaign level, and the keywords at the ad group level.
Defining a campaign
Starting for campaigns, look for queries you found from your keyword research exercise. The intent of the terms should tempt users to take an action.
For example, if you’re selling shoes, you might want to create a campaign for “running shoes”. While the goal of the campaign for people looking for running shoes will be to navigate to your website and make a purchase.
Defining an ad group
Inspect the keywords that can further relate to your campaign keywords. Remember, setting keywords at ad group level is all about identifying terms that answer particular search intent of the users.
For example, the search intent of a user searching for “men’s running shoes” will be different than that of people searching for “men’s formal shoes”.
Apparently, bidding these terms won’t lead your users to their desired search results.
Create relevant ad content
A strong, relevant ad copy is essential for any PPC campaigns as it reduces the CPA (cost per acquisition), and increases Quality Score and CTRs.
Your ad content will be written for different ad groups. Understandably, your ad text will make or break the motivation point in the users to click on the ad. Hence, that’s worth the attention.
Prior to creating content, go through the search engine’s policies. You don’t want to write something that Google doesn’t support or approve of and risk getting your ad removed.
After that, focus on creating compelling, clickable content that catches the users’ eyes in an instant.
Consider the ad copy of Google Ads itself.
How to write an ad copy?
- Try to use the main keyword in the headline and body text, at least once.
- Add actionable terms like “sign up”, or, as in this example, “Reach Potential Customers…” so the customers can precisely expect what they’ll gain through click. (these terms should match your PPC goals)
- Include a clear figure, percentage, etc. in the copy. (searchers are attracted to concrete figures, but you need to deliver what promised when they navigate to your landing page)
- Be vocal with the benefits you’ll deliver, i.e., reach potential customers, improve your sales, broadcast your business story, promote your app, and so on.
- Ensure the display URL is moderate in length and easily recognizable for users wanting to reach your landing page.
- Try to create a more compelling, different ad copy than your competitor, even if both of you are targeting the same keyword.
If you’re rather stuck in making a top quality ad quality, you can always use Ad Extensions. The extra snippets offer more options and space to add other relevant aspects of your brand or offerings like location, contact number, pricing, etc.
The tip is to create, test, revise, and retest your ad copy and uncover what works best for your particular brand. Nevertheless, these seemingly incremental changes can call for a great change in your PPC ROI.
Create landing pages for quick conversions
The purpose of your ads is to direct the searchers to specific landing pages.
And the better you bridge the gap between the user’s search intent and the content on the landing page, the better the chances for conversions.
This is why it is advised not to overuse your homepage as your landing page. For example, if a user types in the query, iOS app development services, and gets navigated to your homepage, i.e., mobile app development company, there is a high chance he/she will bounce back.
Remember, app development also constitutes Android, gaming, native, etc. development. But the user is very clear with his “iOS app development” search intent.
Trying to attract all kinds of users to a generic page can negatively hit your Quality Score. This means the probability of your ads showing up in the SERPs will decrease considerably.
Consistency is the key!
The messaging and the keywords in your ad and landing page content should be consistent.
According to Optimizely, changing only three words to make the landing page and ad text more similar enhanced conversions by 39%.
Keep in mind that your ad text is limited, yet incredibly powerful. Hence, use the same queries and unique selling point terms in the H1 and initial paragraphs of the landing page for maximum and relevance.
Using CTAs
The number of CTAs on your landing page depends on the type of brand and the vital metrics you penned down during the planning phase.
However, at times only a single CTA is enough, for instance, getting users to sign up for a free trial.
Talking about aesthetics
Seemingly, simple, yet user friendly elements make up the most incredible landing page designs.
Keep elements like heavy visual assets, or files that slow down the loading speed, at the minimum. Only focus on adding the most essential fields, testimonials, or other content and visual aspects that encourages users to stay or make an action on your page.
Remember, at this point your objective is persuading users to complete the goal of your campaign. Therefore, getting carried away by over-the-top actions should be forsaken.
Optimization—there’s always a room for growth
Working on how to do PPC campaign also involves optimization of your existing work. Moreover, a constant monitoring over the measurement and reporting metrics.
Locate negative keywords
Creating and implementing your paid marketing campaign isn’t a one-time exercise. Rather, a constant revision is required to determine what is working and what isn’t.
Optimization starts by finding keywords that are ineffective through the Google Ads Search Terms report. And not only in how to do PPC campaign, but identifying unimportant terms is also vital for your organic marketing work.
Keywords that register high impressions, but low CTR, are categorized as negative keywords. In tagging those keywords as negative, your ads won’t show up when users type in that particular query.
This allows you to save your budget and precisely allocate only on top performing keywords. Through this, PPC experts have a better chance to increase their campaigns CTR as well as elevate the overall Quality Score.
Broad match
Broad match keywords make your ad or organic content appear on close variations of your main keywords, even if they’re not included in the primary keywords list.
Secondly, start finding and limiting campaigns that are running on broad match keywords.
It’s a great way to kick start your campaign. However, if done for a longer time, running campaigns on broad match can be a costly prospect for your ads.
The same as you’ll do with the negative keywords. Focus on keywords showcasing high CTRs and alter them to phrase matches, and even exact match types, if possible.
(Note, be patient when it comes to allowing campaigns to produce data. Only then decide to change terms accordingly.)
Focus on increasing ROI
What is the purpose of learning how to do PPC campaigns?
Your paid advertising ROI is calculated through indicators like cost per click, cost per conversion, etc. And optimizing your PPC campaigns means spending less dollars, while getting the same or more return.
For short and medium term goals, your priority should be to adjust the budget for optimum results. Try leaving out low performing keywords, and obviously, reallot budget towards better performing keywords.
For the long term, emphasize on improving the Quality Score by revising your ad copy text, landing page experience, and answering the users’ search intent in a better way.
High Quality Score translates into your ads doing better, consequently, producing great ROIs.
Your campaign ROI should be aligned with the context of your ad copy. For example, if you’re aiming for buyer-intent keywords, then using awareness-based terms, such as top-of-the-funnel search queries, won’t prove fruitful, and vice versa.
Measuring and report
Optimization is nicely done when measurement and reporting is exerted, consistently, to gauge the campaign’s performance.
Hence, measuring and reporting runs hand in hand.
The type of reporting you need for your ad’s performance is ascertained on the goal of your PPC strategy. To do that, go through the Google Ads report to acquire all the relevant information. Here are the major reports you’ll see in the dashboard.
Auction Insights
Users can compare their campaigns with their competitors’ which allows them to plan their future tactics and related tweaks.
Search Terms
As the name suggests, you see which terms are in demand and getting the most clicks. This report identifies negative keywords and terms for exact match alike.
Campaign Performance
The report provides a holistic view of your campaign’s performance over a particular course of time.
Ad Performance
How are your ads performing? The data from this report will show you the most popular themes around different ads and certain CTAs.
If you’re reporting the performance of your campaigns on monthly basis, also include the spikes and fluctuations for each month, as well as the context affecting those alterations.
For example, if the search volume of the term, “best Christmas ideas at budget” increased in the last few weeks and you experienced proportional increase in conversions following the holiday’s season, add that in the report.
End with the forecasted impact for the long-term goals, and what activities are on paper for the next month to improve the current performance of your PPC campaigns.
Final thoughts!
The above guide provides us a comprehensive, yet clear picture on how to do PPC campaign.
Remember, the three major phases—planning, implementing, and optimizing, must be adequately categorized with ample resources and time for the best results.
As trends change with time, stay updated with the consumers’ online search preferences and bid search terms accordingly to acquire maximum ROI for your brand.
