What is PPC Strategy?

A Pay-Per-Click (PPC) strategy is one of the quickest ways to attract potential customers to your website and increase conversions.

The first step in creating a successful PPC strategy is research. We should dive deep into things to gain a clear understanding of your business, audience, and competition.

PPC is a method of paid Internet marketing in which advertisers pay a fee to the search engines for each click. It’s a way of buying a relevant targeted audience to visit your website via search ads, display ads or YouTube ads.

It’s an alternative to taking the long-term Search Engine Optimization route. PPC is about more than running an ad. A PPC strategy is important to make a successful PPC campaign.

PPC allows you to place a small ‘Ad’ on Google search engine result pages. You’ll get a hyperlink to your website and space for a few sales messages.

You’ll bid for the space against other competitors with a certain keyword or group of keywords. A paid search ad is a rapid and useful way of marketing your product or service on search engines.

Search engine ads are the best example of a PPC form of advertising. You need to research which keywords are going to perform best through planned and conversion techniques.

You need to ensure that keywords, advertisement and landing page are all relevant and optimized for conversions.

PPC is highly competitive and you need to follow the right PPC strategies, otherwise, you might spend a lot of money without seeing any favorable results.

If your PPC strategy is not implemented properly, PPC marketing can be risky for your business and cost a lot of money.

Steps for Effective PPC Strategy –

Here are three effective steps to generate a PPC strategy:-

# Business Goals – A PPC strategy or online advertising strategy starts from defining the business goals.

It’ll include your thoughts on increasing brand awareness, driving sales, and lead generation which gives PPC strategy a focus to set a proper budget.

You need to plan your target audience and have a clear idea about their needs and choices and how to achieve it. Knowing your audience is the foundation of your PPC strategy. The next step would be to create a keyword strategy.

When you know the target audience with geo-targeting, then you need to find common searching keywords. Your keywords will be catchwords that will pay you when someone clicks it.

Your crucial and measurable step is to plan your budget with planning on how, and what budget needs to run a PPC campaign.

Every campaign has a start and end date. You need to plan your budget for each day and how long the campaign will be run.

You need to decide your online marketing goals with the following questions:-

• What is the purpose of the campaign?
• What is your budget?
• Is it to increase brand awareness/lead generation / more sales / or to promote a new product or service?

A clear goal is key to the PPC strategy and helps to plan your Ad strategy.

# Choose Platform – A right PPC platform will help to determine the right PPC strategy for a campaign. There are multiple platforms such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and social media channels.

You need to select the right platform to run ad campaigns after study each of them thoroughly because each platform serves multiple purposes and capabilities.

Google AdWords is a widely used platform for the PPC campaign which provides an interesting report with a final grade of overall ad campaign performance.

AdWords offers the advantage of placing a bid in real-time which increases your potential for the target audience. You should carefully decide which platform brings the maximum traffic and converts the best ones.

# Optimize – You must monitor the effectiveness of a PPC campaign when you’re all set with it. You can use the Google Analytics tool to track the performance and progress of Google AdWords networks.

You can review set goals and could measure the key performance indicators (KPI). KPI can be measured to find out the efficiency of your PPC campaigns in terms of value.

How to Optimize PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Strategy –

In the PPC campaign every industry, category, and product or services may insist on a unique mix of PPC strategies.

It can create a combination of PPC features that complement each other and fill in the gaps required to sell any product.

You need to do homework to determine the best PPC strategies for making a PPC campaign. Here are a few tips to create an effective PPC strategy:-

# Quality Keywords – Keywords are a key consideration. You need to use quality keywords that have the best chance of bringing in customers.

You’ll need to increase quality rather than quantity that delivers overall results for your business. You should break-out performing keywords into Ad groups so that you can target them with more effective ad copy.

You can bid on your brand even if you’re top-ranked in organic results. Brand keywords are generally inexpensive and without any competition.

Broad match modifier is a big way to increase volume for campaigns by targeting long-tail search terms. Google has recommended using between 15 and 20 keywords per Ad group. But it’s not an effective solution for all campaigns.

It’s actually ideal to use one keyword per Ad group. It’s known as a single keyword per Ad group.

A single per Ad group will help to improve overall quality score and also enhance the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns. Your user experience should be consistent with the best quality score.

# Geographic / Demographic – You should make a big push to provide PPC content to the geographical areas that are likely to improve CTR.

Google determines the user information based on demographic data of users like gender, age, education, income level, parental status, and languages.

Location targeting helps you to find the right customer. You can target locations like country, cities, state, zip code and territories.

The demographic could make a big difference in the effectiveness of your campaign. Demographic targeting helps you to reach customers who are likely to be within your demographic groups.

# Landing Page – You need to optimize your ads and landing page regularly. It’ll impact click-through-rate (CTR) and keyword quality score.

You should perform the A/B test on your landing page. The landing page for your ad should provide clear and relevant content to your ad text.

You should follow On-page SEO practices to optimize the content on your landing page. Dynamic text replacement allows you to replace certain areas of text with specific keywords.

You can use dynamic text replacement to change the heading and CTA of a landing page to the specific keyword. Your landing page should appear to be a completely personalized experience.

Your landing page needs to be well designed and should be focused on loading speed and usability as well. Google’s PageSpeed tool can help to check whether your landing page is optimized for the best user experience.

# Promotion Extensions – Promotion extensions provide extra attention and visibility to your PPC ads. This PPC strategy is very effective as it grabs the attention of a visitor in no time.

Ads with the least impressions and clicks are often due to the lack of additional information. You should use ad extensions to make your ads stand out in search results.

Ad extensions are a type of ad format that shows business additional information. Ad extensions can improve visibility and increases the number of clicks by improving the click-through-rate (CTR).

e.g. In call extensions, you can use a unique phone number and display it on the landing page.   

The few commonly used ad extensions are Sitelink extensions, Structured Snippet extensions, Call extensions, and Location extensions.

# Add Negative Keywords – Negative keywords are the opposite of your target keywords. Negative keywords in PPC strategy are often overlooked but it’s a highly effective strategy.

It’s a crucial step to make sure that you don’t waste money by displaying ads for irrelevant searches. Negative keywords prevent your ad from being shown against a few certain words or phrase that doesn’t apply to your ad.

Your ads will not show to a user searching for that phrase and it’ll help to lower the total cost. Negative keywords help you to filter out unwanted traffic and help to save money.

# Search Marketing – It’s always a good PPC strategy to identify and focus on channels having a lower CPC for the same keywords.

Remarketing List for Search Ads (RLSA) allows you to customize search ads campaigns for previous visitors to your website.

The leveraging of a mix of both display and search networks enables users’ intent-based campaigns to be highly economical and highly relevant.

Remarketing campaigns tag website visitors when they search the Internet and leverage Google’s broad display network which serves relevant ads on different channels.

Remarketing campaigns can also increase the efficiency of a new marketing campaign by ensuring that a new offer or feature gains considerable acknowledgment.

A user searching for your product or service using a specific keyword with a high CPC can be targeted with display ads that are cheaper and lead to conversions.

# Time-Based Bidding – Bid strategy determines how you pay for users to interact with your ads. Advertisers should identify the best performing hours and days of a week for a successful PPC campaign.

The bid can be increased to enhance visibility and ensure conversions. Visibility should be reduced during low-performance hours to reduce spend on wasted clicks and poor conversion rates searches.

# Mobile PPC Ads – The volume of mobile searches have grown as compared to desktop searches. Everybody today uses mobile devices for Internet searches.

Advertisers need to customize the mobile ad experience to get the best results. Now mobile-specific PPC ads are getting great attention.

A customized mobile ad experience can be a great way to reach a higher number of potential customers. You can lose a significant opportunity to reach potential customers with a mobile ad in your PPC strategies.

You can start by assessing the mobile traffic of a particular keyword in PPC strategies. Businesses can adjust their budget based on the devices with the help of Google Analytics data.

Your website should be well-optimized for mobile users. If your website is taking too long to load on mobile devices, then it’s better to resolve the issue and proceed with mobile PPC ads.

# Google Analytics Lists – Google analytics list gives you the custom combination of various metrics of users like age, location, pages viewed per session, session duration and more.

These lists metrics make remarketing easy for using enhanced targeting and target the right people will increase the conversions.

# Voice Search – The use of voice search is continually on the rise. Voice search is becoming very common due to smart home devices.

The queries of voice search are longer as compared to normal search queries so you should make sure that you optimize voice search.

You should check your campaigns are getting voice search and you can get the search query report from AdWords. You need to filter all the relevant search queries. You can also use the keyword tool to finalize the keywords for your voice search.

The voice search trend is significant for any PPC strategy as voice searches are markedly different in character than typed searches. Now marketers must start devising PPC campaigns that cater to voice search requests.

# Call-to-Actions – The call-to-action of your PPC ad has significant because visitors don’t buy at first contact. You have to put effort into your website to look best for the product or services.

You need to analyze the entire journey of a customer and you can easily verify weak areas where some information is missing. You should recognize which product or service is highly appreciated by the users.

# Social & Display Ads – The buyer is aware of a problem or need at the awareness stage and you need to solve it. Passive ads (Social media and Display ads), and search ads can be effective which depends on your product or service. PPC strategy can use targeting, ad copy, and a landing page focused on exploring the problem.

Benefits of Successful PPC Strategy –

There are two ways to drive traffic to your website: SEO (Organic) and PPC (Paid). SEO techniques take a lot of time and effort to rank your website on the top of the search results page.

PPC strategies involve spending money on advertisements to put your website directly in front of highly targeted users. One of the main benefits of PPC advertising is that it’s very easy to get started.

The key to a successful PPC strategy is continuously making changes based on the performance of your ads and keywords.

# Highly Cost-Efficient – You are not charged if people see your ad but don’t click on it. It helps in spending your money on the potential customer and saving unnecessary expenditure.

# Control on Budget – You have full control over your marketing budget. You can your budget according to business goals.

It doesn’t matter how many people click on your ads once you’ve set the budget. The advertisement platform will not spend more than your budget.

# Immediate Results – PPC strategies as compared to SEO marketing tactics will give you immediate results. You can get instant traffic to your website if your targeted keywords have a high search volume and the quality score of your ad is good.

# Measurable ROI – You can see how many visitors clicked on your ad and how many purchased your product or service. It helps in optimizing your ad campaign performance.

Conclusion – PPC strategy is the backbone of any online business marketing strategy. Each PPC strategy is having the potential to give a strong foundation and will help you in achieving good results. Advertisers must use all PPC strategies depending on the business goals. Distribution of marketing budget in all the available campaigns and monitoring the performance of the campaign is a key to success. If PPC strategies are used in a planned and effective manner then it’ll help in business growth and expansion.