Beginner’s Guide to PPC: What is Optimizing?
Pay Per Click (PPC) is the fastest and most consistent type of Paid Search Marketing that drives traffic to your website. In short, each time someone clicks on your ad, you pay the search engine a small fee. If PPC is working correctly, the visit is worth more than what you pay for it. For example, if you pay $3 for each click on your ad and the click results in a $300 sale, you make a profit.
PPC optimization consists of managing, testing, refining and improving campaigns.
There are many ways you can optimize your PPC campaign, but first, make sure you define your goal. Decide what you want your PPC campaign to achieve for your company, whether it be driving more traffic to your website, delivering a branding message or generating more sales, leads, conversions, etc.
What Is a Content Management System (CMS)?
It is necessary to know the reason for basing the optimization action you want to take. The key to successful optimization comes from being able to identify the source of the problem. Usually, one of the components, such as ad group, ad, keyword or certain targeting leads to an inefficient campaign. The failure of one of these components affects the average campaign statistics report.
Keywords
Identifying your highest performing keywords depends on your goals and which KPI’s are important to you. Begin cross checking and labeling performing keywords so you can specifically focus on them. Go through and pause the low search volume and non-performing keywords. Move those to a more relevant ad group or create a new ad group to improve your overall keywords quality score. Also, always be sure to look for new keyword opportunities and monitor the negative keyword list.
Optimize and Create New Ads
Superior ad text is a result of information that’s relevant to your key words. This is crucial in directing searchers to your site. One consequence of a low number of performing key words is less site traffic. It is also important for your ad texts to be clear and concise. Regularly testing and tweaking your ad copy will bring in higher click-through-rates and optimize your PPC.
Landing Page
PPC campaign success correlates with the amount of sales, not the number of clicks. You want your landing page to be well thought out to reduce the amount of effort the customers put in to searching for products or information. This includes creating separate landing pages for each product, so customers don’t have to waste time digging through your whole website for one item. Lastly, the message explained in your ad copy should directly align with the message on your landing page.
Ad Extensions
“EXTENSIONS CAN IMPROVE YOUR CTR PERCENTAGES BY GIVING PEOPLE ADDITIONAL INFORMATION AS TO WHY THEY SHOULD CHOOSE YOUR BUSINESS.”
Start testing different ad extensions on your best performing campaigns. Extensions can improve your CTR percentages by giving people additional information as to why they should choose your business. Google recommends extensions such as Sitelinks Extensions, Callout Extensions, Structured Snippet Extension, Affiliate Location Extensions and more. 61.9% of PPC clicks were from smartphones during the third quarter of 2017, and that number is constantly growing. Because of this growth, Google has added extensions for ads that appear on mobile devices including Message Extensions and Call Extensions. For PPC optimization, it is also advised to experiment with ad extension on mobile devices, not just desktops.