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PPC Advertising Campaign – A Comprehensive Guide

PPC Advertising Campaign – A Comprehensive Guide

“Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is a paid advertising strategy that attracts traffic rapidly and helps business to stabilize brand and business”

Pay-Per-Click or PPC campaign is a solid strategic advertising tool for your business to rush conversions. Using this digital channel, you can power your online business to make its mark and create brand awareness. This campaign strategy helps businesses to increase revenue, drive traffic, and boost brand recognition in a short time.

PPC campaigns contain various stages that are compiled together to give you the desired output.

The PPC strategy constitutes three key stages –

  • Planning
  • Executing
  • Optimizing

The Planning Stage

PPC advertising strategies in the planning phase contain myriad stages of workload distributed among each of these development stages. This ensures overall marketing growth and brand awareness.

Setting Goals & Defining Budget

PPC campaigns constitute a range of preset goals to boost growth, generate profit and drive conversions. These predetermined goals must align with the overall digital marketing strategy of your brand and business.

Once you have identified the brand objectives, what you want to achieve from your digital marketing strategies, it becomes apparent to devise your Pay-Per-Click ad campaigns accordingly.

For example, you need to define your Key Performance Indicators (KPI) that help you measure how much closer you are to achieving your goal.

Then comes defining a budget that creates a base for your PPC services to market and plans to execute. A limited expenditure on this digital marketing technique depends on your market scalability, target audience, business type, financial position, and others.

Spending a hefty amount to drive traffic is not the answer. Spending strategically and effectively is the answer. For example, you must carefully analyze- the keywords before bidding and how much it will cost you for each lead to work?

Paid marketing needs an initial investment. But it has a higher return on investment (ROI) and needs your attention before you move to the execution phase.

Competitive Analysis

You must make a competitive analysis of your business environment to know what your rival brands are using and how you make your move to stay ahead of the competition. A thorough analysis of your competitor’s marketing strategies helps you devise your PPC marketing strategy accordingly. It also makes you understand how aggressive your ad campaign should be and which keywords to prioritize to get the maximum results.

Keyword Research

In every digital marketing strategy, detailed keyword research is compulsory to optimize your website ranking and boost conversions. It does not matter whether it is paid or organic marketing, keywords are key to all your digital content.

In PPC advertising, the more user-centric keywords you include, the more successful the campaigns are. To start with, you can jot down a list of the keywords your competitors are using. Then you move on with brainstorming broad keywords that will put your product and service forward in the right direction. After this, you figure out which keywords are most used to find your product and service.

All of these help you prepare a final list of keywords for use in your paid ad campaigns and create effective ad copy content. You can also improve your Google Ads Quality Score by using the existing organic keywords in your PPC advertising and boost your Click-Through-Rates (CTR).

The Execution Phase

After the planning stage, comes the execution stage where you need to execute whatever you planned step by step.

Outlining Your Account Structure

First, you need to start by setting up your Google Ad Account, where you are required to define your Campaigns and Ad Groups. Then you need to set your budget at the campaign level and determine the keywords at the Ad Group level.

Start by looking through the terms identified from your keywords research to define your ad campaign. Then the action you want your users when they click on your website from those terms.

For example, if you sell women’s clothing and want to create an ad campaign for jeans. The campaign goal will be to get searchers looking for women’s line of clothing, lead them to your website and make a purchase decision.

You can then again look into the keywords that fit your campaign and define your Ad Group to determine how you can further segment the terms. Don’t forget to set your keywords at the Ad Group level so that keywords with similar search intent are in the same ad group. To make this clear, users searching for “athletic pants” will not be the same users looking for “casual pants”. The bid terms won’t lead searchers to the same destination or results.

Writing Effective Ad Copy

Effective PPC advertising is achieved through effective ad copy. So, always create ad texts within different Ad Groups. This improves Quality Score, click-through rates and reduces the cost per acquisition. So you must invest both time and effort in this step as the searchers will base their decision on clicking on your ad copy and its contents like the text.

Do focus on writing appealing, click-worthy ad copies. But first, you need to familiarize yourself with Google’s search engine privacy policy.

Some of the best practices while following the rules are below-

  • Include actionable terms like “Sign Up” where users can know what to expect, and where to click. These will
  • increase the CTR of your PPC strategy goals.
  • Use target keywords in both the ad headline and body text.
  • Include the benefits of product features in your text for more productive results.
  • Any statistical data in your ad copy may draw searchers to your brand and business website.
  • Always check out the ad copies of your rival businesses, even if you are bidding on similar keywords.
  • Remember to include the URLs as the searchers look into the URL copy for guided navigation. Ensure that your URLs are descriptive and user-friendly too.

Building Optimized Landing Pages

Focus on creating landing pages where your searchers come after clicking on the ads. To boost your conversion rates, minimize the gap between the landing page content and search intent. You may also send all your searchers to a generic page like your home page so that your searchers never feel frustrated and leave the website immediately. Otherwise, it affects your Quality Score and reduces your rankings too.

The landing page must have CTA buttons. The landing pages and ad text should have consistent messaging and keyword content to improve ad rankings. Also, the landing page should have a simple design flow. It has to be user-friendly and exclude the elements that slow down the loading time.

The Optimization Phase

After the execution phase, comes the optimization stage. You need to focus on the elements that help you optimize your content, thereby improving your conversions. You need to constantly tweak your Google Ads strategies to make them successful.

Identifying Negative Keywords For Search Intent

The first step of the optimization stage is to identify the negative keywords. These ineffectual keywords using the Google ads Search Terms report. Always look for keywords with high impressions and low CTR. Consider tagging each as a negative keyword which means that your ad will not show up when people search that keyword.
By removing negative keywords, you can focus your budget on higher-performing keywords, which provides a better chance of increasing the CTR, and also improves ad Quality Score.

Never restrict your ad campaigns to broad matches. This means when searchers use the keywords, not on your list, your ads may appear on relevant variations of your keywords. This will make your PPC advertising more powerful, boosting conversions.

Optimizing ROI

Optimizing paid search ROI (Return On Investment) means paying less money while enjoying the same or better benefits. ROI for paid search is measured by the objectives of your paid search campaign like- cost per click, cost per conversion, and so on. You can improve your ROI campaign in a shorter period by distributing your budget strategically. You can reallocate the budget by abandoning low-performing keywords and investing in high-performing ad groups.

Also, focus on writing compelling ad text, create ad copies matching user intent and include a relevant landing page. This helps in improving ad Quality score. Always remember, the higher are your quality score, the more you can save for future PPC services, thus optimizing your ROI.

Measurement & Report Analysis

The last stage of the optimization phase is measurement and reporting. These are the ultimate step sewed with the paid search strategy. As you plan the measurement activities, the reporting comes with it. Your job is to find information from the Google Ads Reports to obtain the objective of your PPC strategy.

Some of the reports that you will come across are-

  • Auction Insights – This is where you are compared with your competitors. You need to use this report as a tactical advantage to plan all your activities.
  • Search Terms – It will show you which terms are getting more clicks. It also helps you to spot negative keywords and identify words for an exact match of your ad copy used by searchers.
  • Campaign Performance – This shows your performance at the campaign level. You can utilize this report to optimize your performance over time.
  • Ad Performance – This explains how each of your ads is performing.

Key Takeaways

The different phases of PPC advertising from planning, to executing and optimizing the whole campaign, are major tasks. You need resources that include strategies like the use of Ad Extensions, ad snippets that optimize ad copy. And these strategies require some initial investment. Apart from investing in an ad, you need to invest in time and effort too.

It is always advisable to outsource the work to professional digital marketers of the top digital marketing agency in India and accomplish your business goals.