If you’re considering paid search alongside your other marketing efforts, you’re going to need to know about PPC.
Pay-per-click advertising is one of the more established digital marketing methods. It offers faster, more reliable returns for businesses who use it effectively, gaining them greater visibility and more conversions too.
Looking for more information on how to attract this kind of valuable traffic to your site? Keep scrolling to see what PPC could do for your brand.
Why Paid Acquisition?
While organic efforts to increase site visitors (in terms of both quality and quantity) still dominate, other methods should not be discounted. Paid acquisition refers to paying for ad spots on popular platforms like Google and Amazon to gain your target audience’s attention. These can be invaluable for boosting your visibility and getting visitors to your site fast.
PPC: A Quick Overview
The issue with previous forms of advertising is that you would pay a premium for real estate on a host’s platform only in the hopes of getting noticed. You weren’t guaranteed success in attracting site visitors.
What PPC does differently is that you only pay the host a fee when a user clicks through to your website. So, while you’re still not guaranteed success, your marketing output is directly linked to getting visitors to your site. So, if your ad doesn’t work, you’re none the worse off.
While PPC can be used anywhere, search engines make popular platforms, especially Google, with its enormous amount of daily traffic. Here you can create ads and decide where you would like them to appear based on bids placed on relevant keywords. On the SERPs, PPC ads are given a prominent position even above results that rate high organically.
PPC Really Works… When Done Right
PPC boasts many benefits: cost-effectiveness, better brand exposure, instant traffic, and high click-through rates for more conversions and increased sales revenue, among other things. A visit to your site by a potential customer will be worth more than you are paying for the click to get them there. However, these benefits will only be felt if it’s working as it should.
Paying for clicks seems like it should be relatively straightforward, and it would be if keyword bids were the only component for SERP placement. However, those that achieve the top spots will do so based on various factors measured by the search engine’s own algorithm. An ad’s quality score, which will get it placed higher, depends on the site’s relevance to the keyword, the quality of the ad copy, and the click-through rates achieved.
In truth, a lot of work goes into building and running a successful PPC campaign – far more than you might realize. This includes:
Researching and Selecting The Right Keywords
Finding the right keywords can seem like a long, drawn-out process, but it’s definitely not one to be hurried over. They should encompass popular search terms to get you found but also include long-tailed keywords that people are more likely to use closer to the point of purchase.
Bidding on the wrong keywords will, at best, lead to you paying for clicks from users who are not really interested in your offerings and therefore, out of pocket. Even worse, you could get penalized by the search engine for irrelevancy no matter how much money you are offering up.
Creating Enticing Ad Copy That Demands Clicks
With most ad formats, you don’t have much space to play, so constructing something that stands out from the crowd can be challenging. Aim to address a need your audience has and explain how your product or service can help them with this.
Make the most of every tool available to ensure your ad catches the eye. For instance, Google ad extensions enable you to take up a little more space on the SERPs, advertise more products and services, and include links for different landing pages for a better site user experience.
Optimizing Landing Pages To Turn Click Into Conversions
Getting platform users to your site will be for nothing if they can’t find what they are looking for when they get there or if the page takes so long to load that they give up before they even get there. This will also reflect poorly on your ad’s quality score and subsequent placement.
Make sure your landing page accurately reflects your ad’s call-to-action. So, if site visitors click for more information on a product, that information should come up right away and above the fold. If they are there to sign up for a discount, they should be able to do so without navigating to another part of your site.
Tracking and Monitoring Your Campaign’s Effectiveness
To ensure you are investing your resources in advertising wisely, you need to constantly analyze the performance of your various PPC campaigns. Remember that while ineffective ads will not be costing you anything, those that use the wrong keywords will be bringing in the wrong audience, and at a price.
Making regular adjustments to your campaigns by altering the copy to see what works best, adding and removing keywords to hit the right demographics at the right times, and promoting specific deals and specials will optimize your ads for better success. In this way, you can make them more engaging, more helpful to users, and therefore, more effective and high–performing.
Search engines also reward those who create relevant, well-targeted PPC campaigns by charging them less for ad clicks. The more your ad and landing pages prove satisfying to their platform users, the lower your marketing output and the higher your business profits will be. So, if you really do want to make the most of PPC, it pays to take the right approach.
If you like what you hear and would like to learn more about how Firon Marketing can help you with PPC and other forms of customer acquisition for your website, take a look at our paid acquisition services and schedule a chat with us.
