Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Marketing Best Practices

by Meghan Dillow
August 3, 2016

Whether you are just starting your online advertising campaign or revamping your current one, pay-per-click marketing can be a great source to increase revenue. PPC is an internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays a publisher (typically a website owner or a network of websites) when the ad is clicked. Advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. On average, 41% of clicks go to the top 3 paid ads on the search results page and for high commercial intent searches (someone looking to buy a product) paid ads get 65% of all clicks. As you can see, a lot of great site traffic can be acquired by using pay-per-click marketing. Follow these best practices to jump start your PPC campaign.

Start With the End Goal in Mind

You don’t want to start your pay-per-click campaign without knowing the end goal, and I’m not talking just about driving traffic to your site. Planning should be based around the business objectives and business model of the company. What is it that your PPC campaign needs to do for your business and what metrics are you going to use to determine its success? Measuring according to your defined business objectives and not to performance metrics is critical to increasing your ROI. If conversions are your goal, you will need to implement conversion tracking into your PPC campaigns. Check out these basics on conversion tracking and implementation across several of the major PPC programs.

Do Keyword Research

Your entire pay-per-click campaign is built around keywords. Yes, keyword research can be time-consuming, but it’s very important to the success of your campaign. Your goal is to find relevant keywords that will lead to a high click-through-rate and a low cost-per-click. You want to include frequently searched terms specific to your business as well as long-tailed keywords. An important thing to remember in your PPC keyword strategy is to also include negative keywords. Negative keywords tell Google what search queries are not relevant to your business, so you don’t rack up ad impressions for searches that won’t lead to sales.

Write Great Descriptive Phrases

Most pay-per-click advertising requires that you write a few short descriptive phrases about your product or service. It’s very important to make sure your grammar, spelling and language is correct and suitable for your audience. Also verify that your language adheres to the rules enforced by the pay per click service – Google, for example, won’t allow ads with superlatives (“the best,” “the greatest,” etc.), with repeated keywords, or with excessive capitalization.

Optimize Your PPC Landing Page

The keywords and phrases on the ad and landing page should be consistent. Pay close attention to the message you are sending out when drafting the ad and landing page. The key to a successful landing page is to answer the visitors’ inquiry, which is probably why they clicked on your ad to begin with. Stay focused on what you promised in your ad and don’t forget to include a call to action (CTA) on the landing page. Your PPC’s message should guide them toward the button, which in turn leads them further down the conversion funnel.

Use Remarketing Techniques

Remarketing lets you place targeted text and/or image format ads in front of people that have previously visited your website while they browse the web. It allows you to stay connected with your audience even after they have left your site. Remarketing can increase brand awareness, drive repeat traffic to your site and improve ROI.

Continual Management of PPC

Putting in the time and effort to set up a successful PPC campaign is important, but without the constant management and optimization, the success of a campaign can quickly turn south. You need to continually refine ads and re-evaluate keywords to ensure that each click is a valuable one.

Following PPC best practices is essential to the success of your pay-per-click marketing campaign. To see what the true cost of running a PPC marketing campaign looks like, check out How Much Does Pay Per Click Marketing Cost?

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