How To Successfully Manage a PPC Campaign

PPC advertising is a popular way of improving your brand’s visibility and increasing the number of leads or sales. These campaigns also increase traffic on your website, ultimately bringing you more conversions, regardless of your niche. Unlike search engine optimization (SEO), a pay-per-click campaign is going to bring you immediate results. 

A major reason why businesses opt for having PPC ads is to grow their business in a short amount of time. Even though these ads seem easy and straightforward, there are some things you should be aware of before you create a successful campaign. 

We’re going to cover the most important steps towards managing a highly-effective pay-per-click ad campaign with Google Ads.

STEPS TO SUCCESSFULLY MANAGING A PPC CAMPAIGN

Optimize Your Website

Before you start planning your PPC campaign, it’s important to make sure your website and all of its content are optimized and ready to work together with your ad to bring your more business. Many businesses choose to create a separate landing page that’s specifically designed for people who are actively looking to buy a service or product.

A landing page can help you increase your chances of conversion. However, this is not always necessary. If you have a simple website that’s straightforward and works well as a landing page itself, you can use it without any issues. 

Important things to keep in mind when it comes to optimizing your website are of course speed, user-friendliness, and relevance to your ad. Make sure that your website has lead magnets. Otherwise, all of the traffic your receive through ads will be pointless.

For example, if you want to create an ad for a special deal or promotion you have, make sure that the landing page actually reflects and mentions that. This will decrease the chances of bounced users and actually improve your odds of bringing in more business. 

Other tips to attract customers into making a purchase include using compelling CTAs, simple designs, a clear and straightforward copy and headline, and strategically places images or videos. 

Choose A Bidding Strategy

The next most important thing to pay attention to is selecting your bidding strategy. Depending on what kind of budget you’ll be working with, you’ll want to choose a bidding strategy. Google Ads lets you pick between manual, automated, and smart bidding. 

Choosing your bidding strategy will also depend on your experience level with pay-per-click ads and your overall goals. Manual bidding is great for those working with smaller budgets because it allows you to put a cap on your cost per click (CPC). However, when working with manual bidding, you won’t be able to optimize your bids.

On the other hand, opting for automated bidding will mean that you’ll cut the time spent managing the campaign, but you’ll probably end up paying a bit more. Finally, smart campaigns are also automated campaigns, and they are probably the easiest to set up and manage, but they often give you subpar results.

Select a Budget

Your selected budget is an important part of your PPC campaign, and the good news is that you can still get great results even with a small budget. You’ll want to determine how much profit you’ll be making from each conversion and then how much of that profit you can afford to sacrifice as commission in your PPC campaign. 

If you’re unsure how to do this, you can look at your past data and see what your conversion rate is, or simply use the industry standard. According to WordStream, a good conversion rate is anywhere between 2% and 5%. 

After you’ve figured out your conversion rate, or you’ve chosen to use the industry standard, you should multiply that number with the maximum cost per click you ideally want and then multiply that with the number of days you want to run your campaign for. This will give you an estimated budget that would be perfect for your PPC campaign.

Research and Pick Keywords

Researching and picking the right keywords is probably the most impactful part of managing a successful PPC campaign. Being the backbone of the entire process, proper keywords are essential for getting your ads in front of the right audience. To put it quite simply, the keywords let the search engine know when to display your ad.

By determining and choosing the right set of keywords, you can ensure that your ad gets impressions and click-throughs, which will ultimately lead to more paid traffic and conversions to your website or store. You can also review what your competition is using if you’re unsure of your choices. 

Other great tips include using keyword research tools, such as Moz or SEMrush, both of which have received excellent reviews from their users. The better your keywords are, the more ad hits you’re going to get, and additionally, you’ll be rewarded with a lower CPC and higher quality results. 

Aside from your target keywords, you’ll also want to work on negative keywords, which will exclude searchers looking for something you’re not offering. For example, if you’re selling pizza but don’t offer deep dish pizzas, you’ll want to add relevant negative keywords to fully optimize your ad audience.

Create an Impressive Ad

Now that you’ve got your landing page or website, bidding strategy, ad budget, and keywords all ready to go, it’s time to create your ad. Remember to always keep your ad copy straightforward and to the point. There’s not going to be a lot of time or room for grabbing the attention of potential customers. 

All of your ad copies should be written with a clear goal in mind. Google Ads has a limited amount of characters for each of its fields. 

There are three headlines that are 30 characters each, along with two descriptions with 90 characters each. There are also two Path fields, with a limit of 15 characters each, which are supposed to give your audience an idea of where they’ll end up after clicking on the ad link. 

In order to grab the customers’ attention, try to come up with a unique and valuable copy that stands out from your competitors. Make sure that you clearly point out the benefit of using your service or buying your product that makes your brand special and different from the competition.

Include a CTA

A CTA, which is short for call to action, is the thing that’s going to stand out the most in your entire ad and also the thing that’s going to bring conversions and revenue. Without it, there would be virtually no point in even running an ad campaign.

An effective and well-thought-out CTA will let your audience know what they should do next, whether it’s to submit a quote form on your website, give you a call, or directly purchase something from your store.

Your optimal CTA should be short, clear, and concise. More often than not, there are premade templates, such as Buy now, Call now, Book now, and many more, but you can create your own custom CTA according to your ad strategy. 

For example, if you’re promoting a sale, you can set your CTA to say Get 10% Off Now, or something else relevant to your promotion in order to get the best results. 

Regularly Test and Optimize Your Ads

Once you’re done setting up your campaign, the work doesn’t stop. It’s crucial to monitor the progress of your campaign and regularly test it. By doing so, you’ll ensure that you’re getting the most bang for your buck and that your target audience is actually converting into customers and bringing you more revenue.

Measuring the performance of your ad, tracking them, and making constant adjustments and changes is crucial for improving your results. One of the most popular tactics that many marketers use is called A/B testing, which basically means you’ll be running two very similar versions of your ad at the same time. 

However, there will be slight differences in certain elements, such as keywords, copy, landing page, or even CTA. You’ll want to monitor each of the ads and see which one brings you better results. That’s how you’ll be able to fully optimize your ads and stop wasting money on less effective tactics and strategies. 

It’s also crucial to use analytics to drive sales. By finding what works for your brand, you’ll get better leads, more conversions, and ultimately more revenue, which is the goal of any PPC campaign.

Consider PPC Campaign Management Software and Tools

Finally, after you’ve mastered all the steps toward managing a successful PPC campaign, you should know that there are also many useful tools that were created to help you better understand, manage, automate and optimize all of your paid ads. Often, these apps can help their users with automated bids and results reporting, among other things.

You can also use these tools for ad text creating, keyword research and suggestions, and even keyword grouping. These apps will help keep you organized and informed while providing you with strategic automation that will help you build your PPC campaign to its fullest potential. 

A PPC campaign management app can also help you do competitor research and keep an eye on their strategies and tactics. Some of the most popular campaign management tools include Captivise, AdEspresso, Acquisio, and many others.

LAUNCHING A SUCCESSFUL PPC CAMPAIGN

Even though pay-per-click ads aren’t necessarily difficult to manage, they do require at least some knowledge in order to be able to maximize their potential. You should be familiar with how the entire process goes and know how to research and properly plan your campaign in order to maximize your ROI (return on investment).

Some of the most significant things to remember include optimizing your website or landing page, thoroughly researching keywords, exploring what bidding strategy works best for you, setting your monthly budget, and finally, creating a killer ad. 

Whether you choose to do everything by yourself or you opt for a PPC campaign management tool for further assistance, it’s important to regularly track and tweak your campaign to get the best results, increase traffic, conversions, and ultimately your revenue.