Improve PPC Success With These 7 PPC Optimization Strategies

PPC (pay-per-click) optimization is an often underlooked marketing strategy that can be incredibly beneficial to your overall marketing efforts. One reason many businesses overlook it is because they think that it will cost too much to implement. However, PPC advertising is actually quite cost-effective. This is because PPC optimization works by allowing you to bid on specific keywords. You can bid however much you want. While the amount of your bid will affect how often the ad is displayed for that keyword, you will only pay for the ad if it’s clicked on.

Of course, the success of your PPC campaign will rely heavily on whether or not you get clicks and whether those clicks result in conversions. With that in mind, the following are seven PPC optimization tips to improve the success of your PPC ads:

1. Perform Keyword Research

Don’t assume that you know what keywords your target audience will use. Using keywords without performing the necessary research can result in inefficient use of your marketing budget. The last thing you want to do is bid for keywords that you can’t compete with or that expose your ads to the wrong audience (resulting in low click-through rates and low conversion rates).

When performing keyword research, identify keywords that are relevant to your business, to your ads, and to your audience. Find out what the search volume of each keyword to figure out whether they will be effective at exposing your ad as well as whether you’ll even be able to compete with them. Via keyword research, you’ll also be able to identify new keywords you may not have thought of before as well.

2. Identify Negative Keywords

When running ads, you can find out what keywords and search terms were used to trigger your ads to display. Some of these terms may not be relevant and can be considered “negative” keywords. You can add these to a negative keyword list to ensure your ad doesn’t show up for those terms. For example, if your clothing company only sells adult clothing, then the word “children” would be a negative keyword.

3. Know Your Audience

Knowing your audience is essential for identifying keywords that are relevant to their search queries. After all, if you target the wrong audience, your PPC ads won’t perform well. To figure out who your audience is, develop buyer personas based on your ideal customers. These will make it much easier to successfully target your ads, both in regards to the keywords you use and the copy you write.

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4. Create Effective, Relevant Copy

If your keywords and your copy don’t match up, it’s going to affect your ability to generate clicks. After all, if someone performs a search and an ad is displayed that isn’t relevant to what they’re looking for, that person is not going to click on your ad. Your copy not only has to match the keyword, it also needs to be well-written and to the point. Make the copy easy to scan so that people know exactly what it is you’re promoting and what the benefits are of clicking on the ad. Additionally, keep in mind that a good title is essential to drawing attention. Without a good title, people will scroll right past your ads.

5. Create Effective Landing Pages

Getting clicks is going to be an enormous waste of money if nobody is converting. One of the most common obstacles to a highly converting PPC ad is the landing page. If your PPC landing page is poor, it won’t convert. In fact, some businesses don’t even have landing pages — they just direct the people who have clicked on their PPC ads to their homepage. If you do this, they’ll have no idea what they’re supposed to do.

Your landing pages should reiterate the offer of your ad. Make sure the page is clean and easy to scan. A cluttered landing page can be distracting and confusing. In addition to emphasizing the offer of your ad, make sure you use the same language — including the same keywords.

6. Optimize Your Ad Groups

Google recommends that you create three to four ads per ad group and to create different messages for each one in order to see which performs best. Your ads will rotate automatically to display the ads that perform best most often.

7. Test Your Ads

Make sure to test your ads so that you can identify what works and what doesn’t. For example, you can create an ad group with one control ad and one test ad. You can test ads using different keyword variations, titles, copy, and more. Monitor conversion rates, cost-per-conversion, and click-through-rate to identify what ads perform better and to optimize your ads more effectively.

The key to a successful PPC ad lies in how well you’ve managed to optimize that ad. These are seven PPC optimization strategies that you should implement to help boost the effectiveness of your PPC advertising strategy.