5 Tips on How to Set Up a Profitable PPC Strategy
In the era of digital marketing, pay-per-click advertising (PPC) has a proven record of increasing business and profits. A strong PPC strategy allows you to increase visibility on search engines and social media. It is reported that customers to your site are 50% more likely to make a purchase if they were pulled in with PPC.
Experts are assisting businesses in doubling their customer base, but if you are looking to set up a profitable PPC strategy on your own— we can help! Keep reading for our five tips for PPC profitability.
Paid Search Spend: Define Your Goals and Budget
PPC strategy can have a range of goals: growing your business, increasing profit, boosting conversion rates. Which goal is right for you? Look at your quarterly goals for guidance. For new businesses, your best option is to grow your business. This can be a more expensive strategy but will help increase customer loyalty and boost the start of your business. Once you have this strategy, make sure that you are only participating in PPC actions that support this. It is vital that once you have this goal, it remains unchanged. Typical PPC strategy takes months to work, so don’t get discouraged if you are not seeing immediate results.
The next step is to make sure that you set your budget. Unlike your goals, this should be malleable and easily adapted for changes in the marketing environment. Identify your breakeven point between when your spend efforts start producing a positive ROI. If your goal is to grow, this might be a goal KPI and not a baseline.
PPC the Smart Way: Analyze Your Competitors
After you set your goals and budget, identify your main competitors. Once you have them, start diving deep into their paid search strategy. What are they doing that is making them successful? How aggressive do you need to be in your PPC strategy to compete with them? Use keyword planner inside Google Ads or another keyword system to identify your competitors’ organic and paid keywords. You can use these keywords to prioritize your own keywords. Ask yourself the following questions in your analysis:
- What are your competitor’s most profitable organic keywords?
- What are your competitor’s most profitable paid keywords?
- Are these keywords worth targeting for your business?
- Are there keywords that your competitor is not targeting?
Once you have a list of keywords from your competitor analysis, start brainstorming your own. There are many tools for this, but Google Analytics is a great free option. Create ad groups of these keywords with goals in mind. Group keywords based on relevance to your business and to each other.
PPC Content: Write Helpful Ad Text
Now that you have your ad groups, the ad text for each will be different. The right copy can either inhibit or accelerate your ad; it can increase your click-through rates and reduce your customer acquisition cost.
In your ad copy, you should use the target keyword at least once in both the headline and body of the ad. This will create relevancy for your ad. Within the copy of the ad, there should be a CTA (Call to Action). This can be as simple as a “give us a call today” line. The copy of your ad also includes your display URL. Customers commonly look to the URL to make sure that it follows the ad and looks user-friendly. A great baseline is to look at your competitor’s ad to see how they are strategizing. Try to make your ad more compelling and descriptive. After you have finalized this copy, make sure to run tests and change your ads as needed.
PPC Endgame: Create an Effective Landing Page
Each ad should take your customer to a specific landing page. If your ad just takes the customer to your homepage, they will likely get frustrated when they do not see the content they were looking for and leave your page. The more aligned your ad and landing page are, the higher your conversions will be.
This landing page should have clear messaging and the relevant keywords should be increasingly present. Studies have shown that including relevant copy on the landing page has increased conversions by 39%. Each landing page should include a CTA based on your goals, have a user-friendly design, and only contain the most essential copy. Your objective should be to make a sale, and not for the customer to bounce around your site.
PPC Continued: Optimize, Strategize, Adapt!
Once you set up your PPC strategy, you cannot just let it run itself. A successful ad strategy should be constantly tested, tweaked, and adapted. Start this process by identifying keywords that are hurting your conversions and ROI. You can do this by using the Google Ads Search Term Report. Look for keywords that are high in impressions but have a low click-through rate. Go through this list and identify if they are in the correct ad group or if you should tag them as a negative keyword. Negative keywords ensure that your ad will not appear for that search term, and will increase your click-through rate. Also through this process, identify if there are broad search terms that are hurting your spending. Broad match allows your ads to appear on any variation of the search term. You might want to eliminate those at this point.
Finally, refer to your goals and find out if your ROI is in line with those goals. If your goal is to decrease your cost per conversion, it will likely be time to optimize your spending. Try distributing your budget or reallocating your budget to higher performing ad groups.