Pay-per-click marketing provides businesses with several tools to increase ROI and reach potential customers, but to get the most from this strategy takes knowledge and expertise.
An effective PPC marketing plan starts by setting clear goals. Doing this will allow you to select platforms and ad types that best align with those goals.
Identifying Your Goals
As the first step of developing a pay-per-click (PPC) marketing plan, setting your goals is the initial step. Your goals may depend on the purpose of your paid ads but should always be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely goals.
To set realistic goals, it’s important to conduct some research. Examine your competitors in your industry and their PPC strategies; this will give you an understanding of what works for them and where you could improve. Afterward, create goals that are both attainable and challenging enough to keep yourself engaged with the process.
Many companies strive to raise brand recognition. One way of accomplishing this goal is through running display and search ads that feature your business and its products or services, or you could even utilize remarketing ads to target visitors who have visited your website before.
Designed specifically to get their name out there and attract potential customers, this campaign type can also be utilized by established businesses looking to reengage existing clientele.
Increased conversions are another popular PPC goal. To do this, promote your company values, offer discounts or special promotions, highlight customer testimonials, and find other ways to entice potential buyers to buy from you. Also, try product listing, remarketing, or cart abandonment ads, encouraging shoppers to complete their purchase process.
Repetition sales can be an excellent way to increase profits. To do so, promote warranty information, return policies, and any features that encourage customers to choose you over competitors. Also, encourage repeat purchases by including ads with loyalty benefits like discounts or free shipping.
Raising traffic should be one of the primary goals of any business. Remarketing ads allow you to reach users who have previously visited your site, search ads can drive targeted visitors directly to relevant pages, and Google Ad Extensions allow certain ad formats more reach.
Creating Ad Groups
While budgets and campaign structures will come later, one of the primary functions of a PPC marketing plan should be documenting tangible measures for success. If your goal is to generate more revenue for your business, clearly define this in your PPC plan, along with ways that you’ll measure this success. Being as specific as possible about these goals will ensure your team stays on course as they progress with PPC campaigns.
Creating Ad Groups is essential in setting up a PPC account, serving as containers to hold keywords within your campaign hierarchy and allowing for easier keyword organization by themes that make sense for your business. For instance, if you sell shoes, ad groups might include casual footwear, sports footwear, and formal footwear categories with relevant keywords so your ads reach the appropriate people at the right time.
Ad groups also serve another important function: they help keep your ads from showing for irrelevant search queries. One way to achieve this goal is by conducting keyword research and identifying searches most closely associated with your products or services, creating negative keywords, and then setting ads not to appear for queries that do not match your offering. For instance, if you sell Renaissance Madonna art prints, including pop star Madonna as a negative keyword would help prevent ads from showing when people search her name for music-related searches.
Once your ad groups and goals have been set up, they must be regularly reviewed and refined to remain in line with other businesses and avoid overspending on clicks that don’t result in conversions. You should also research competitor strategies to see how they’re reaching audiences and what works and doesn’t work for them.
Finally, testing and optimizing your ad copy – headline, description, landing page content, and target keywords – is essential before making any definite commitments to any element. Small changes can have major effects, so testing everything before committing fully.
Creating Ads
PPC ads are one of the best ways to drive traffic and boost sales, but to ensure success, you must create a comprehensive plan encompassing identifying goals and metrics and measuring progress.
Search Ads are one of the most effective campaign forms, appearing when someone searches for keywords relevant to your product or service on search engine result pages (SERPs). Display Ads also display visually on websites targeted towards your target audience.
Establishing a budget will be essential to creating PPC ads. Your budget will depend on factors like your business size, industry, and competition in the space. Goal-oriented budgeting could also help ensure your marketing objectives are being met.
Once you’ve decided on a budget, the next step should be creating and selecting an ad platform. When writing persuasive and informative ad copy that attracts potential customers, include relevant keywords while using ad extensions to increase the visibility of your ads.
Establishing the ideal bidding strategy is also of utmost importance. You must decide whether you will use manual or automatic bidding – manual requires manually setting bids for every keyword you target, while automatic optimization optimizes them automatically.
You can run various ads, such as standard text ads, dynamic search ads, and shopping ads. Each type has its purpose, but all share key characteristics, like an effective call-to-action button, image, description, and an appealing landing page.
Once your ads are live, it’s important to decide how best to manage them – Google Ads Manager or Microsoft Advertising Editor (formerly Bing) could work just fine – then regularly monitor their performance and make any necessary adjustments. It also pays to watch how competitors’ ads are faring so you can assess which results constitute positive or negative experiences and adjust accordingly in your campaign.
Managing Ads
Once goals have been established, it’s time to create and manage ads. This involves selecting platforms and ad types that best align with your marketing objectives – for instance, if your objective is increasing brand recognition, then social media and display ads could work. At the same time, search and PLA are great choices if sales or conversions are important to you.
When designing ads search ads must always keep the user in mind when designing campaigns. This is especially important when designing search ads that capture user intent and direct them toward a website or product page. Ads must be creative yet informative – providing clear descriptions of products or services offered and prompting potential buyers to take the next step on their buyer journey by including an explicit call to action such as “buy now.”
PPC campaigns’ effectiveness is determined by the quality of their advertising copy and landing pages, so multiple versions of ads must be created and tested to evaluate their effectiveness. Split testing (A/B testing) is a popular method used in online advertising to see which ones perform better and which require modifications; it can help maximize return on investment for your paid marketing budget.
One important part of the PPC management strategy is monitoring competitors and industry trends. You can do this by researching keywords used by competitors, the audiences they target, and their ad copy; this will enable you to gain insight into their approach to digital marketing and identify gaps within your strategy.
Researching competitors can give valuable insight into the market and what your business requires to compete effectively. You could gain an idea if one competitor targets specific pain points or value propositions that you could focus on instead of your campaigns.
PPC campaigns can dramatically impact any company’s bottom line, so having an established plan and spending your budget wisely to achieve optimal results is vital.