In its purest form, Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising offers one of the better values for your marketing dollars. After all, with PPC, you only pay for the ad when a searcher clicks on it. However, PPC can also lead to a lot of expense if your ads are poorly targeted. If people click your ad but don’t buy anything (convert), you’ve spent money for nothing.
To improve the odds of conversion in your favor, here’s how to be successful with PPC advertising.
Choose Keywords
The foundation upon which PPC is built, carefully chosen keywords, are the make or break aspect of every campaign. The terms you choose must be specific enough to attract your target audience. For this reason, it’s very important to choose them carefully. Search engine providers know this and set keyword prices based upon their popularity. This means you’ll have to be strategic when you’re working with a limited budget. A strategy based upon mid-tail keyword phrases of four words or less gets you a more narrowly focused response and has the added benefit of being a less expensive method of conducting a campaign.
For example, if your goal is to sell your furniture online, rather than buying the expensive keyword “furniture” focus your campaign around a specific type of furniture and buy keywords directly related to it. For example, “leather sofa sleeper” will attract people looking for that specific item, as opposed to those seeking furniture in general. To take it one step further, you can also include terms to which you don’t want your ads to respond. In this case, you’d designate words like bedroom furniture, coffee tables and office furniture as “negative keywords.” Since every click comes at a cost, you want to eliminate the possibility of anyone other than leather sofa sleeper shoppers getting your ad.
Target a Specific Location
Targeting a specific location is equally important. Why have your ads go worldwide if you’re primarily interested in selling into your local area? This also gives you the ability to focus your keywords even more narrowly; like “leather sofa sleepers in Santa Fe” for example. (Image source:)
Even if you do want to sell nationwide, it’s still a good idea to target specific regions, as this gives you the capability of observing how well your ads are playing in different areas. That way, you can tailor your copy to appeal to customers in particular locales.
Lead Customers to a Landing Page
Your ad should also lead to a specific landing page to minimize the effort your customer has to expend to make the purchase. Your main goal is to convert clicks into purchases, so make sure all of the information a customer needs to make an informed buying decision comes up (including a buy it now button) when they click on your ad.
Yield a High Quality Score
As you get deeper into the world of PPC, you’re going to run across a lot of different terms and metrics, many of which will be somewhat confusing. One of the most important to understand is Quality Score. Basically, the more relevant your ads, landing pages and keywords are to a user’s search, the higher your Quality Score. High Quality Scores are also rewarded by most platforms with discounted pricing, so this can get you better rankings and more leads at a lower cost.
These basic strategies will help you be successful with Pay Per Click advertising. Yes, it’s complex, but done well, PPC produces good results. And remember, nobody gets it exactly right the first time around; successful PPC campaigns put the data in control.
Have you used Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising to sell or market online?
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