We’ve built a short PPC Strategy Checklist to ensure the strategy you do develop is effective. 5 Simple Steps to Develop an Effective PPC Campaign Strategy not only organizes the process of developing a PPC strategy into an easy framework, but it also includes a quick PPC Strategy Checklist.
In summary, identifying the correct platforms, targeting features, and ad kinds to deliver their message, as well as balancing investment in each, is the first step in our five-step methodology for effective PPC marketing.
These 5 stages might help you get a good start if you’re ready to establish a more comprehensive PPC marketing strategy for your company. Let’s get this party started!
Step 1: Define your objectives
Defining your objectives is perhaps the most crucial component of developing an efficient PPC campaign strategy. There are a plethora of PPC targeting choices accessible today, both within Adwords and outside of it. Defining your objectives can aid you in selecting the platforms and ad types that are most appropriate for your marketing requirements.
Consider the following frequent PPC objectives: Increase site traffic Generate leads Drive sales Raise brand recognition If brand awareness is your primary goal, social media, and display advertisements are appropriate. If you want to increase sales, you should spend the majority of your PPC budget on search or PLA. If generating leads is a top priority, consider employing Facebook’s lead capture advertising.
To target their audience, sophisticated PPC tactics use a combination of ad kinds and channels. Ben Wood, a digital marketer, for example, has some sound tips on how to split your budget between social and search ads: 4 Advanced Audience Targeting Techniques for AdWords
Select and prioritize your major objectives, then utilize this information to determine which platforms and ad types to invest in.
Step 2: Identifying your target audience
Here’s a rundown of how to use AdWords PPC and social media to target your audience. Which advertising choices you should spend in will depend on the type of audience you’re targeting and where they are in the sales funnel.
AdWords audience targeting The key to success with AdWords audience targeting is to target based on intent rather than the most relevant terms connected to your business. The keywords you bid on, the ads you show, and the landing pages you send them to must all correspond to where they are in your sales funnel.
Traditional PPC wisdom suggests that there are three types of search intent keywords: transactional (searchers looking to buy something) and informational (searchers looking to learn more about something).
Searchers want to get to a specific website or resource, therefore navigation is important.
Here’s a helpful visualization from Moz that shows how keyword targeting changes when optimizing for voice search:
Most firms can’t and shouldn’t target all of these keyword categories for PPC right now. The ones you concentrate on should be determined by the nature of your business and other marketing techniques. Consider the following scenario:
To promote conversions, an eCommerce business should focus on transactional keywords.
To improve user experience, a SaaS or app developer should invest more in navigational terms.
Of course, search isn’t the only PPC channel in which you can succeed. On the Display Network, YouTube, and Gmail, you can target a variety of various types of audiences:
Affinity audiences are used to increase the reach of television commercials. Create personalized affinity audiences by defining interest categories using URLs, sorts of places, and keyword phrases.
Audiences with specific intent: Create unique audience groups based on keywords and URLs related to what your target audience is looking for on the internet.
.Adwords can analyze and build these for you using machine learning technologies. When creating a PPC ad strategy with AdWords, it’s critical to think about all of the targeting choices accessible. You may better allocate your ad budget by using search and display advertisements to target audiences at different points in the sales funnel. For example, if you use to display advertisements to target top-of-the-funnel (awareness stage) audiences, you may use search ads to target bottom-of-the-funnel keywords.
Increasing your social media following
As a result, you have the option to target individual leads (Custom Audience), those who are similar to your existing leads (Lookalike Audience), or demographics, interests, behaviors, and other factors you specify (Saved Audience).
You’ll want to use these audience insights tools not only to target your advertisements but also to learn more about your audience so you can design landing pages and lead nurturing material that resonates with these specific buyer personas (more on this later).
3rd step: Make your landing pages more effective.
Creating distinct optimized landing pages for your ads when targeting a big number of keywords might be difficult. Directing people to a generic products or landing pages, on the other hand, is a waste of ad expenditure. Not only are site visitors less likely to convert, but their on-site activity can also result in lower Quality Scores, making it even more difficult to contact them through PPC.
The most successful PPC managers understand the importance of audience targeting and landing page optimization. Here’s an example of landing pages that are deliberately optimized for original search intent: I searched for “freelance accounting software” and came across an ad for Xero:
When I go through, their landing page text emphasizes on their value proposition for freelancers on the go, rather than business owners in general:
If you’re utilizing social media advertisements to promote top-of-the-funnel material, make sure you’re using the right content categories and language for the platform. Buzzsumo is a fantastic tool for coming up with article ideas. Let’s say you’re a parent who sells baby carriers and wants to promote them on Facebook. Simply type your term (?baby carriers?) into Buzzsumo, and it will provide the most popular content connected to that topic.
Step 4: Make your advertisements
You’re ready to build and optimize your advertising once you’ve set up your audience targeting and created suitable landing pages. Your advertising function as a link between the landing pages you’ve already optimized and the search intent/interest of your audience. The idea is to demonstrate your unique selling proposition and provide value in a short amount of time. To improve your advertising, try experimenting with new copy, graphic assets, extensions, and other features.
By creating ad variations in AdWords, you can test different headlines, calls-to-action, extensions, and more. Duplicate ads and use search and replace to switch out text and elements to create your own tests. Adwords can find the most effective ad versions for you over time if you allow ad rotation in Advanced settings. Set your ad rotation optimization to prefer the best-performing advertisements automatically:
The design and optimization of social media ads can also be automated. Facebook Dynamic Creative will build ad variants for you based on your ad components (image, video, title, description, and so on):
These clever tools can help even the most seasoned advertisers produce and optimize their PPC ads. Just make sure to build and test a range of ad features to get a true sense of what your target audience responds to.
Step 5: Evaluate and improve your pay-per-click (PPC) marketing approach.
When you employ the correct tools, as discussed above, optimizing your ads fits seamlessly into the ad development process. So the real goal of your research is to figure out which keywords and targeting features help you achieve your campaign objectives.
Here are some fundamental metrics to think about for search, display, and/or social ads (depending on your campaign goals):
- CTR (click-through rate): This can assist you in determining how relevant your ad content is to your keyword or audience targeting for social or display advertising.
- Rate of conversion: A poor conversion rate could indicate that your ad budget would be better spent on keywords that perform better. How much are you willing to pay per click (CPC) to get a member of your audience’s attention? That’s the CPC you’re looking for. The cost per acquisition (CPA) can tell you how competitive your keyword is and whether it’s worth it to spend in it based on the conversion profit margin.
- Quality Score (Adwords): This measure combines the effectiveness of several aspects, such as ad relevancy, landing page relevance, and click-through rate.
- Return on ad spend (ROAS): This is a bottom-line indicator that measures how effective advertising is at achieving financial objectives.
If lead nurturing is your goal, you should also examine on-site engagement metrics such as page visits, new or returning visitors, and so on.
Keeping track of crucial indicators might assist you in determining the relevancy and success of your advertising components (ad copy, targeting, landing pages, etc.). Data science may help you optimize your PPC ads for conversions in a variety of ways. You may utilize these data to adopt sophisticated targeting methods to boost your ROAS even more after you have a clear understanding of the best keywords and audience targeting.
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