PPC Tips & Tricks to Turbocharge Your Campaign

With so many options available to us in the world of digital marketing, sometimes deciding what direction to take can be difficult. You’ll want to know the latest trends in order to bring in the most success from your advertising efforts.

PPC marketing campaigns, or pay-per-click, are very popular and have the potential to be very lucrative. But how?

Keep reading to learn more about how PPC advertising works, as well as its benefits, pitfalls, and tips to take your campaign to the next level. We’ll even walk you through how to measure the success of these campaigns. Just stay tuned.

How Pay-Per-Click Advertising Works

If you’re thinking of implementing pay-per-click digital marketing strategies at your company, it’s important that you first know what to expect. In a nutshell, the advertiser pays a small fee per click on each ad.

This may not sound ideal, but if you go about PPC in the right way then paying a very small amount could very well be worth it in the grand scheme of things. Fees are typically under five dollars, and could result in much higher sales.

PPC ads are also very flexible, since you can pick and choose the design to be whatever you want— text, images, videos, et cetera. 

These types of advertisements can show up in search engine results as well as on websites and social media. How exactly PPC marketing works can definitely depend on what platform you’re using. 

Google Ads, for example, is far and away the most popular PPC marketing system. You might take different steps advertising through Google versus elsewhere, so make that decision as early on as possible.

Typically, though, you’ll begin with deciding what type of campaign you want to spend your time and money cultivating. Knowing where your ad will be seen will help you later when it comes time to design it.

The next step is narrowing down your targets for this advertisement. What sites do you want to display this ad? Who do you want to see it? What devices do you want the ad to be formatted for? What times should your ads be visible? The answers to all of these questions are super important.

You should also figure out what your budget and bidding strategy for this campaign will be early on. Decide what price you want to pay per click, because that will inform many of your other decisions.

In addition, decide what specific part of your website you want to take potential consumers to when they click on your ad. If you’re selling a product or service, you will typically want the link to take people straight to a page where they can make a purchase as opposed to the homepage of your website.

The last and most important step is to actually create your ad! You have a lot of freedom in this area, but take your time making the perfect ad. An algorithm will determine who sees it depending on several factors, including but not limited to your ad’s quality.

Every PPC advertising platform has incentive to work with marketing campaigns that bring in revenue. If your company creates an excellent campaign that a lot of people click on, then future ads may be placed in more optimal locations for a lesser cost.

Pros and Cons of PPC

There are plenty of good reasons why you might want to upgrade your pay-per-click advertising methods, and yet just as many potential pitfalls to watch out for. Let’s go over some of the pros and cons of PPC before you decide if it’s the right fit.

As discussed above, PPC ads are incredibly customizable. You have more creative freedom with pay-per-click than might be the case in other forms of marketing. This means that you can even make changes while the campaign is still going on.

You can also create very specific ads with PPC digital marketing, and thereby target an audience that is more likely to generate positive results. Choosing who gets to see your ad is instrumental in reaching customers, especially considering the fact that people often appreciate relevant ads more than random ones.

PPC advertising happens to be fairly cost-effective, too! Advertiser fees for pay-per-click are usually very cheap, and after all as the name suggests you only pay it when somebody has already clicked on your ad. This means you’ve had some success with it.

If that’s not concrete enough information for you, though, don’t worry! PPC advertising campaigns are also very easy to quantify. They’re set up to monitor effectiveness closely, and this is fairly simple to do since the main goal of these campaigns is clicks.

In fact, you’ll start to see data from your PPC campaign relatively immediately, as soon as clicks start coming in. Other advertising tactics, such as SEO, can take months to yield results, but with PPC you’ll be able to look at how many people you’re reaching and how much revenue you’re generating right away.

On the other hand, though, there are some more negative aspects to PPC marketing that you should also be aware of.

For example, though the impact can be immediate once the ads are posted, the process leading up to that point may not be. In order to bring in the numbers you want, you’ll need to invest a lot of time beforehand. You’ll also want to continually put effort into improving ongoing ads.

The process doesn’t become hands off even after a campaign has gone live. Especially considering the multiple costs incurred; things can add up if you’re not paying close enough attention. That’s why optimization is such an important step.

Also, remember that clicks on your website don’t always equate sales— even though you’re paying for every single one.

Having skilled members of your team who know a lot about PCC digital marketing can be invaluable, too. If unable to practice with it yourself, then delegate learning about PPC to a colleague who you trust to handle it well.

Tips and Tricks for PPC

If you want to make sure your pay-per-click advertisements are the absolute best they can be, we have compiled some helpful advice.

Since Google Ads are a very popular PPC advertising platform, here are some hacks that can give your campaign a huge boost there.

First, you’ll want to pay a lot of attention to keywords. Since Google’s main function is as a search engine, you’ll want your ad to show up in those search results. This is especially true if your advertising copy.

Single Keyword Ad Groups, or SKAGs, are ads that focus on a singular keyword. This helps if you’re trying to get a specific message across.

In addition, think carefully about where you want your keywords to go in the ad in order to maximize results. Through “dynamic keyword insertion,” Google can replace text in your ad with a chosen keyword. Use this feature sparingly, though, to make sure your ad retains its meaning.

Though it might sound counterintuitive, negative keywords are just as important as positive ones!

This will prevent your ad from showing up under irrelevant searches, thereby making sure that the people who see your ad are more likely to click!

To that end, you can play around with different match types to make sure that you’re reaching your targeted audience. Phrase match, modified broad match, and exact match strategies for your keywords could prove wise.

Another great way to generate more success for your campaign is to utilize ad extensions. If possible, give additional information about your business here that would help potential customers reach or research you.

Location, phone number, website links— all of these will not only be helpful to your audience, but can also give you a boost in search engine optimization.

When developing any advertising campaign, making sure you reach your targeted audience is absolutely crucial. Thankfully there are several ways to reliably do so.

For example, if your product or service would be particularly relevant to people who live in a certain area, then you can implement location targeting. You’ll want to keep advertising to locations where you see a lot of results.

This is also important for local businesses— don’t advertise to customers who won’t be able to support you.

Scheduling ads is also an important aspect of generating more traffic. There may be specific hours where your target audience is more active online, or more likely to make a purchase. These are high-performance hours, when you’ll likely have the most success. Increase your bids during this time.

Just as you should adjust your bids during different times, you may also want to adjust them for different devices. Look into whether mobile or desktop users are more likely to click on your ad, and then market accordingly.

Optimizing for devices can be really helpful for your budget. On Google Ads, including this feature is very easy to do.

Another great way to develop your audience is to implement RLSAs, or remarketing lists for search ads. If users have visited and interacted with your site before from your ad, then they’re more likely to do so again! You definitely want to keep them interested.

Last but not least, you should constantly be testing your ads to make sure they work as intended.

Pay attention to the data that Google Ads provides, since it’s a valuable resource that you can use to elevate your campaigns. Pay attention to updates and trends on the platform you use, as well, to make sure you always know what’s coming next.

Monitoring Your Campaign

Speaking of what’s coming next, let’s discuss the best ways to keep track of your campaign’s success once it’s live!

Lots of quantitative information will be made available to you through PPC marketing campaigns. Tracking and managing that data will be instrumental to your campaign’s success. 

There are three different types of KPIs, or key performance indicators, that you may want to monitor: traffic-focused, conversion-focused, and revenue-focused.

In order to generate more traffic from your ad, you’ll have to observe the traffic you already have. A good number to keep track of, especially for PPC campaigns, is the number of impressions and the click-through-rate.

Whenever someone sees your ad, it counts as an “impression.” As you may expect, you want as many impressions as possible. The click-through-rate, or CTR, is how many people out of one hundred impressions actually click on your ad. A high CTR means you’re doing something right.

Your impression share percentage— how many people saw your ad out of the total number that could have —is also very important. In order to maximize impressions, lots of PPC marketers look at the average position of their ad within search results, too.

Another traffic-focused KPI is your ad’s quality score, which is a rating on your ad’s relevancy. This is why having a target audience is super important.

Speaking of your target audience, conversion-focused KPIs have a lot to do with customers. “Conversion” can mean a lot of different things depending on your company, but in a nutshell when a customer “converts” it means that they’re providing you with the desired result.

It stands to reason, then, that you would want to know how many people are clicking on or purchasing something from your ad out of the total viewers. Tracking conversions can help you predict how future consumers will behave.

You may also want to keep track of where converting customers come from— what website did they see your advertisement posted on? More people on that website might be interested in your company!

Last are revenue-focused KPIs. These include the previously discussed data such as cost-per-click, cost-per-acquisition, and revenue on ad spend. 

Don’t lose sight of the fact that you want to make a profit from your ad. Compare how much you’re spending on each individual click with how much an average viewer of your ad chooses to spend.

It may seem daunting at first to pay a fee every time someone clicks on your advertisement, but the results of PPC marketing campaigns may be more than worth it if you go about it in the right way.