Not happy with your current PPC results?
Or trying a PPC Advertising Campaign for the first time?
Well, you have landed on the right page.
Now, tell me what do you expect from your PPC campaign?
Conversion
Right?
But PPC ads fail to deliver results as per your expectations.
Why?
Because marketers often jump in PPC advertising campaign to derive fast results. They think of PPC as a short way to get the conversion faster. But they don’t know the preparations needed behind those short-cuts. All they do is write a couple of fancy messages sharing a common idea and publish them on PPC advertisements.
Results?
No traffic or visitors.
What if I tell you that you can be successful at PPC by learning only a few rules only?
Sounds too good to be true. But these ground rules actually exist that increase your chances of success with PPC campaign. Soon, I will expose them through this article and you will learn them within a matter of minutes.
9 Rules to Run a Successful PPC Advertising Campaign
Outline Your Advertising Goal
Does it work for you to sit in the car and start driving, not know where to go? That’s craziness. What I mean to say is you always need a destination so that you can drive in the right direction.
Similarly, for a successful PPC campaign, you need a goal (destination) to plan effective strategies (direction).
Take a moment to imagine the end-result you want to see from your PPC advertisements. Obviously, the most common imagination is seeing the flow of visitors – all of them converting to your customers. But you have to be more specific as you have to deliver the message through your ads.
Your goals must be like “increasing visitors” or “brand awareness” or “spreading awareness regarding of new product launch” if you want your ads to look natural, not forceful.
Define Your Budget
Do you know average Pay-per-click price varies as per the type of industry?
(Source)
Those who are not aware of PPC prices, often feel taken-aback when they see the price overflowing out of their budget. They fail to put prior ads first as they don’t plan the budget in advance.
Better to decide how much you are willing to pay at max before you finalize the list of targeted keywords and number of ads. This way you select keywords and ads with extra care to make sure all your ad messages are well-covered under your budget.
Structure Your Campaigns
Organizing your campaign is like building a house from scratch where you collect bits and pieces to give a shape to your house. Same way, to structure your entire PPC campaigns, you have to gather 5 things:
- Your Adwords Account
- Number of Campaigns with names
- List of keywords you plan to include in your ads
- Keywords wrapped in groups to create specific ads relevant to each group
- Ad copy for each group
Once you prepare them all, put them in a below give format to have a bird’s-eye view of your campaigns.
Use a Dedicated Landing Page
Most advertisers make the mistake of keeping the home page as a landing page of all ads. This is like cheating to users where you show them something else while sending them to somewhere else.
Don’t repeat the mistake as users expect to land on the page that’s highly relevant to the ad, delivering a seamless user experience that leads to conversion.
4 Key Ingredients to Create Dedicated Landing Page
- Highly Relevant to Ad
- Content Specific to Targeted Audience
- Designed to Reflect users’ benefit
- Contain Call-to-action
Consider Your Audience
Who is your audience?
Demographics like Gender, Age, Parental Status, Household income, etc., will help you better understand your audience. After all, your whole campaign is about your audience, so you must put efforts to know them. Answer to all demographics will help you craft a better user-oriented ad copy.
Keep the demographics in front throughout your ad campaign. It helps you improve as you progress further.
Use a (Strong) Call-to-Action
Don’t be mistaken here. Call-to-action doesn’t mean that you must include a clickable button in your Ad. It also means to use converting words in your ad copy and landing page to approach users for taking action.
As per Wordstream’s top-performing PPC campaign analysis, 6 words drive higher clicks than others.
- Your
- Free
- Save
- Best
- Free Shipping
- You
These words trigger actionable feelings among users. Try your best to mingle them naturally with your ad copies.
Install Conversion Tracking
Want to know how many visitors actually turned to conversion through your ads?
Thanks to Google Adwords for offering a snippet of code to track ad converiosns and the actions taken by visitors after they click the ad.
Installing Google Adwords Conversion Tracking
- Open your Adwords account
- Click Tools -> Conversions -> +Conversions
- Select Conversion Source: Website, Apps, Phone Call, Import
- Enter Conversion Settings: Name, Value, Count, Conversion Window
- Review And Finally Install (Place Snippet of Code on the Page where final conversions have taken place)
Monitor Your Campaign
Monitoring your PPC campaign is essential to adjust keywords, ad copies, landing page, etc., to improve their effectiveness. You can either monitor them manually like checking the quality score, keeping track of the number of visitors, watching click-through-rates, etc. Google analytics and Adwords offer almost all monitoring data. Or you can select some third party tools to help you monitor everything without straining your eyes.
Assess Performance Correctly
At last, you need the overall performance of your ads on hand so that you can make necessary changes for your future campaigns.
To know your ad and keywords performance:
- Open your Adwords Account
- Click “Campaigns” Tab
- Click the “Ads” tab or “keywords” tab
Here you will see the status, CTR, and Average CPC of your ads or keywords through which you can define overall progress of your ads and refine your campaigns.
Wrapping Up
It doesn’t end here. Once you are finished with campaign running, analyzing, and monitoring, you start walking on a path of improvement. From there you will get to know your audience better which help you create effective ad campaigns and increase the number of conversions. All the best.
