Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is a very powerful tool in your marketing mix, if it is done right.
Getting it wrong can be very costly and before you know it, you have spent a lot of money without getting a return. We often hear stories from businesses who have tried PPC but then felt it ‘didn’t work’.
It’s rarely the case that PPC doesn’t work, it is usually another factor, either the campaign not being set up effectively or the website not providing the right user experience to convert the visitor into a lead or a sale. Essentially, you should be bidding on searches that mean the person is actively searching for what you do or what you sell. If you run your PPC campaigns efficiently you can achieve a very good return on investment.
As with all your marketing campaigns you need to start by setting your goals, without a clear goal being set you will not know what you are measuring against and will struggle to make improvements. You will also need to set conversion goals in your Google Ads account. You can create these in the Google Ads platform or in your Google Analytics account and import them into Google Ads. Make sure your conversions are meaningful, like a purchase or a completed lead form.
It is important to research your keywords. These need to be the right intent and divided into separate products and services. What we mean by this is, if you are a company that sells bathrooms and kitchens, you don’t want to include keywords for both services within one ad group. Without clearly laid out campaigns you run the risk of negatively affecting your quality score which can lead to a higher cost per click, lower conversion rates and higher cost per acquisition.
Talking of quality score, In order to help improve it, make sure you deliver people to a relevant landing page. This means, if your campaign is about new bathrooms, deliver people to a page about new bathrooms. If it is about new kitchens, deliver them to a page about new kitchens.
Remember your goals and make sure they can be achieved on this page or within a couple of clicks. A good landing page needs to convey your value proposition, provide relevance and clarity and give the user some urgency and reason to make contact. Your PPC landing pages shouldn’t be like your SEO pages. They don’t need lots of words on them to help them rank, they need to be concise and compel the person visiting to complete the action you want.
If your website is e-commerce, you will also need to make sure that you are clear with your delivery costs and returns policy, as leaving these until checkout can cause people to abandon at the vital time.
All of these things will help with your user experience and improve conversions, but none of this will matter if your website pages don’t load quickly. As soon as someone clicks on your PPC ad, you will pay for that click. If your website doesn’t load quickly, the user won’t hang around, and you would have paid for the click for nothing. A study from Deloitte showed that a 0.1 second improvement can boost conversion rates by 8%. Make improvements here, even if you shave off just a few milliseconds.
Once your campaigns are running it is important to monitor their performance. Some of the regular checks should include the keywords you are bidding on and the search terms you are getting clicks for. If they are not converting you might want to consider changing them or moving them to your negative keyword list.
Make sure you regularly check your ad copy and A/B test changes to try and improve your click-through rate. Look at your ad assets (extensions) and how well they are performing. Remove or change those that are not working for you. You may also want to consider time-sensitive assets for things like sales, early bird offers or seasonal holidays.
Lastly, consider bid adjustments for those keywords, devices or audiences that are more likely to convert. Increase for those that have potential and decrease for those that are not performing.
If your PPC is not getting the results you want, make sure you go through the whole campaign from your website to the individual keywords you are bidding on. Test any changes you make and monitor the results.
If you need any help or advice optimising your PPC or are interested in running a Google Ads campaign for the first time, please contact us.
