Why do you need a results-driven campaign?
The major driver of PPC is the instant results, and a solid PPC campaign can drive significant revenue, traffic, leads and long-lasting customers. A fast return makes PPC an attractive channel for many businesses, and it’s often favoured over organic channels like SEO for that reason.
However, PPC campaigns are highly complex and require a lot of strategic planning. Although it’s an effective channel, it’s also quite hard to navigate and get right, especially if you’re new to paid marketing.
We’ve put together this handy list of tips from a PPC agency, to help you drive maximum engagement and ROI from your efforts.
Do enough research
The first step in your PPC campaign is the research phase. There are different types of research that are key to any campaign, including:
- Keyword research
- Competitor research
- Customer research
To make more engaging ads, it’s important that you research all these areas before going live with an ad. Now it’s more important than ever to really research your target audience, given recent changes to keyword targeting (e.g. BMM phrase-out). Try to think about the following before diving into a project:
- Who is your ideal customer? (age, occupation etc.)
- What project or service are they most interested in and why?
- What brands are they currently buying from?
- Are there any customer pain points?
Answering these questions (and any more you can think of) can help you to create a clear customer persona that will really narrow down your targeting.
Narrow down your target audience
So, by this point you will know who you want to target and the type of person that is likely to purchase your product. It’s likely you’ll have more than one ‘type’ of person who falls into this category of potential customers.
We recommend looking at each of your customer groups and narrowing it down to one primary choice. Although you will want to target customers with different behaviours and interests, it’s likely that you will end up spending more money on targeting all these users than you would profit.
Targeting down to one user can also decrease the amount of brands you’ll be competing with. You’ll find it easier to position yourself against 1-3 competitors than if you were targeting a broad audience with many competing brands.
If you are a new business, you may want to start off by running some broader campaigns to drive brand awareness.
Establish your messaging
It should be obvious what you’re trying to tell your customers. Instead of focusing solely on promotions, try to think about the foundation of your messaging, i.e. your brand image. If a user can spot your brand values, it builds a sense of transparency.
Think about how you can really help your customers (in general, rather than with a one-off discount). Once you start to consider this and show it in your ads and online content, it can have a significant impact on your CTR and ROI. For example, does your product bring emotional benefits? Will it make something easier for buyers?
Have a well-defined PPC objective
This seems obvious but it might be the case that you have more than one goal and try to cover each on with a single campaign. You’ll likely see more results and a better ROI if you focus on one primary goal as the key objective.
Without a clear and trackable goal, you will find it difficult to optimise your campaign appropriately or drive noticeable results. Your goal is essentially the baseline of the optimisation process. So, think about what you want to achieve from your PPC ads, this will depend on your business, industry and brand values but some examples include:
- Drive traffic to your site or landing page
- Generate sales
- Get more video views
- Drive awareness for a product launch
- Get subscribers
- Encourage people to attend an upcoming event
Try to make these goals as specific as possible. For example, if you’re focusing on brand awareness – think about why and what type of users you want to reach.
Take action on poor performing keywords
Without a solid keyword strategy, it’s almost impossible to drive real results from PPC. As well as focusing on the keywords that are bringing you traffic, remember to focus on the ones that are not. For example:
Pause any keywords with low performance
You’ll know if a keyword has poor performance if it’s been running long enough to acquire reliable data. If a keyword has only been running for a week or less then it’s best to wait a while before rushing to pause it.
Before pausing a keyword, try to figure out why it’s not performing well, as it could be something worth fixing instead of pausing altogether. Keywords often don’t perform well if:
- The bid is not high enough: This could be temporarily increased as a test.
- Your chosen keyword has low search volume: You’ll need to do more keyword research.
- The match type is too broad or too restrictive: Try to reach out to a more niche audience or a wider audience if you’re not getting any clicks.
Build out your negative keyword list
Again, it’s important to get rid of any negative keywords because they will be using budget without bringing in any results. It’s important to continually visit your negative keyword list and build out more terms to reduce your costs and improve your results.
Without negatives, if you’re using broad match types, it can be quite easy to waste money on searches that are unrelated to your business.
If you need help launching a PPC campaign or want someone to step in and maximise results from an existing ad, feel free to get in touch.