Whether you’re a beginner or have worked with a company before, if you follow these insights you’ll learn how paid advertising campaigns are operated and what to expect when working with an agency.

 

It’s clear that consumers go to the internet before they buy a product. In fact, 97% of consumers go online to find local products and services and 98% of searchers choose a business that is on the first page of the results they get. (BrightLocal)

 

If your brand doesn’t have an online presence all these consumers will go to a competitor by default.

PPC management can help provide brands with a platform to advertise directly to the exact type of customers you need to grow your business.

These campaigns can help build awareness and generate revenue for your business.

If you haven’t used paid per click advertising before, then this is exactly what you need to know to apply it to your business.

What Is Pay-Per-Click Advertising?

Pay-per-click advertising, or PPC, is an online advertising model in which advertisers pay each time a user clicks on one of their online ads.

There are many different forms of PPC ads that can help grow your business.

Paid search ads are the most common type you’ll see. These ads are the ones you see using big search engines like Google. These are identified by the “Ad” icon next to the URL for the ad.

Display ads are another type of PPC ad you can use to help reach people that are interested in your product or service.

You find these often during retargeting campaigns whenever the user has already visited one of your landing pages. You’ll see these types of ads identified by the icon in the upper right corner.

Social media advertising is another method of running ads that’s exclusive to the platform you select. Popular social media platforms you can choose from include: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

Remarketing ads is an incredibly effective way to re-engage your target audience. These are visitors that have visited one of your landing pages or websites.

Whenever they visit any other social media or website they will continually see your ads ‘follow’ them around.

These help improve brand recall and help improve conversion rates. These are also identified through the same means as social media advertising and display ads.

Local service ads are a smaller type of advertising that’s only available to specific markets including:

 

• appliance repair services
• carpet cleaning services
• cleaning services
• electricians
• estate lawyer services
• financial planning services
• garage door services
• HVAC (heating or air conditioning)
• immigration lawyer services
• lawn care services
• locksmiths
• movers
• pest control services
• plumbers
• real estate services
• roofers
• water damage services
• window cleaning services

 

These are shown at the top of Google search results when people search for your product or service in your area. Customers can click to call or send you a message.

Instream ads are ad roll placements within your favorite videos within a relevant video context. These ads can show at the beginning, middle, or end of the video and are usually identified by a small icon in the picture below.

You find a YouTube video you want to watch (tutorial, review, etc.) but right before the video begins, there’s an ad that plays. There are also “mid-roll” and “post-roll ads”. These can be targeted by geolocation, native language, demographics, topics, and interests.

Discovery ads can be found in your YouTube’s mobile home feed and in Gmail’s Social and Promotions tabs. Here’s an example of three common places you’ll find your discovery ads landing.

Now we understand all the types of ads that will be managed throughout this campaign. All that is left now is to setup and manage these ads.

What is Pay-Per-Click Management?

PPC management is where a marketer (or team of marketers) oversee a company’s entire PPC ad strategy and budget. This can be done by an in-house team of marketers and media buyers, or outsourced to an external agency.

A PPC expert (or agency) usually takes care of the following tasks:

Keyword Research: We identify keywords that your target audience is searching for including long tail keywords. This helps expand the reach of your PPC campaigns

• Target Channels: We focus on the paid media channels that cater to your business. These can include Google Ads, Bing Ads, display networks and even social media advertising.
• Split Ad Groups: We will optimize for the best click-through rate by splitting ad groups into smaller and more relevant ad groups.
• PPC Daily Review and Monitoring: Every day we measure each campaign, check for negative keywords, adjust budgets, and take out any ads that are not creating a positive ROI
• Competition Analysis: We analyze what your competition is doing, what their ads look like, and the keywords that they are targeting to look for more opportunities to drive leads to your business
• Split Testing: Constant A/B testing of new ads and landing pages. Regular experiments across the entire PPC funnel.
• Refine Landing Pages: Modify the content and calls-to-action (CTAs) of your landing pages to align with individual search queries in order to boost conversion rates.

Elements of a Pay-Per-Click Campaign

Every move we make with our pay-per-click ads have a purpose so we don’t run ads that could damage a brand or the partnership with Google.

It’s best to stay in the good graces with whichever platform you’re advertising through.

The best way to make sure everything is setup correctly is understand the working parts of a campaign so that the best practices are always followed.

Here’s a typical dashboard on a Google Ads account.

Campaign – There are easy ways to automate this setup through Google’s default settings but we always recommend going through each part to ensure everything is setup for YOUR business goals.

Most beginning PPC advertisers will utilize mainly search ads and display ads. These two ads paired together can create better conversions than just setting up one or the other.

It’s in this section you can create ads based off whichever goal suits your ideal outcome like: sales, leads, website traffic, product and brand consideration, brand awareness and reach, and app promotion.

Ad Groups – These are one or more ads that share similar targets. For instance, let’s say you’re running a BOGO beverage campaign.

Within that campaign are an ad group for coffee drinks and one for soda drinks.

Naturally, the keywords, ad text, imagery, and landing page should be different for each ad group.

You should make adjustments to your ads every day to keep them converting. Ad groups help the backend dashboard of your Google Ads account stay organized and optimized for your campaigns.

Ad Extensions – This is a great practice to add to all of your ads. This creates a clickable link under the ad that takes the user to specific landing pages based off of the keywords used for the clickable link.

This can make your ads more appealing and take more space on the first page of Google too!

Keywords – There are few strategies you can use to help find the right keywords to target for your ads.

It’s recommended that you take multiple approaches to this by checking your competition for popular keywords, use Google’s Keyword Planner, and use the keyword tool Keywords Everywhere.

This tool gives you commonly used long tail keywords associated with your main keyword you’re researching.

Always look for keywords that are relevant, thorough, and consistently growing.

Ad Text – It’s important to write ads that are appealing and catered to your audience. In 60 characters you have to offer value, information and insert a call-to-action.

Landing Page – Whenever an ad is clicked the customer is taken to a web-page called a Landing Page. This page is incredibly important because it can have a big impact on how well the ad does.

Keep your message and visuals consistent with your ad and what the service or product you’re providing.

Make sure you have logical call to actions and very clear messages and direction on what the customer needs to do next.

Often split testing is done with this page to help find the best design that converts the most viewers.

PPC Metrics to Track

Metrics are everything (but you already knew that). Here are some key metrics to track within your PPC campaign.

Clicks refers to the total number of clicks you receive on an ad. This metric is affected by your keyword selection and the relevance of your ad copy.

Cost per click (CPC) measures the price you pay for each click on your ad.

Clickthrough rate (CTR) is a percentage of ad views that views results in clicks. It’s commonly referred to as the metric that measures the success of an advertising campaign. Here are some CTR benchmarks based on different industries.

Impressions are the number of times an ad was viewed but no action taken. Cost per impression (CPM) is determined for every thousand impressions. Impressions are used to help boost brand awareness.

Ad spend is the amount of money per day you are spending on your ads.

Return on ad spend (ROAS) is the ROI of your ad campaign. This metric calculates the revenue received for every dollar spent on ads.

Conversion rate refers to the percentage of people that complete the call-to-action on your landing page and become a lead or customer.

Cost per conversion is the total cost paid for an ad in order to get a desired action. This is calculated as the total cost of an ad divided by the number of conversions.

Quality Score (QS) determines ad positioning either at the top or bottom of the page and the position of the ad in relation to the other ads. This important metric and help you spend less money while increasing the results you get.

How is CPC Determined?

The cost per click is determined by several factors, including your maximum bid, the ad rank of competitors and your Quality Score.

The Formula for Calculating CPC is:

(Source)

Quality score is the search engine’s rating of the quality and relevance of your keywords and PPC ads.

This score is directly correlated to your success in Google Ads and Bing Ads.

The factors that affect your quality score include:

• Keyword research and relevance to the ad group
• Click-through-rate (CTR)
• Optimize your landing page for relevance and quality
• Ad test quality and relevance
• Add negative keywords
• Rewrite ad text to include keywords
• Your account performance

Focus on PPC Ad Copy

Once you have the campaign setup and you’re ready for your ads to go live; great ad copy will get these potential customers to click on your ads.

In order for your ads to get clicks and viewers will be to solve the intent of the user.

With paid ads, you need to give the user exactly what they’re looking for.

Understanding what they want and need will help you write the best copy to appeal to their problem.

Let’s break down search ads and figure out the anatomy of a good ad.

Let’s start with the first ad which is made up of a headline, a URL, a number, a short description and ad extension link, which are the blue links right below the ads.

To make the most of this space, make sure your ad copy does the following:

• Speak directly to your target persona
• Include the main keyword that you’re bidding on
• Provide an actionable CTA so the searcher knows what to do next
• Keep ads current
• Make the offer appealing
• Use language that matches your landing page copy
• Perform A/B Split tests with your copy

Landing Page Best Practices

These are the pages you send the users after they click on one of your ads. This page needs to offer relevant, useful, and original content. It’s very important to create a synergy throughout your ads, message, and landing page.

We always try to promote transparency to create trustworthiness to our potential leads.

Easy navigation can help the user find exactly what they’re looking for. In order to make the navigation easier you’ll need to make sure your landing page is mobile optimized and responsive.

Viewing your ads on a mobile device will help ensure that the look and feel of your ad stays consistent and professional. Check out this example of a typical landing page.

Another tactic to help your landing page is to decrease the landing page loading time.

There are many ways to help increase how fast your landing page loads on mobile. Check out Google’s (AMP) Accelerated Mobile Page.

What should a PPC landing page include to increase conversions?

• Test headlines that mirrors your search ad
• Clean design and layout
• Responsive form that is easy to use with a stand-out CTA button
• Copy that is very specific and relevant to your target keywords
• The offer that was promised in your ad
• A/B tested
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A/B Testing Your PPC Ads

An important part of every campaign is to consistently A/B test ad copy and landing pages. The goal of split testing is to increase your CTR(click through rate) and your conversion rate.

The 4 main things you should always be testing are your headline, description, landing page, and target keywords. Whenever you split test you always want to only change one of these elements at a time.

 

Any one change can have huge impacts on how well your ad performs.

 

With so much potential, changing only one element insures we can identify what part of our message is resonating with our end user.

It’s always a best practice to leave your changes you’ve made alone for a few days to let it fully run and gather data before you make another change to that same ad.

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Additional PPC Tips and Tricks

There are a few other things you can do to maximize the ROI of your paid ads, whether it’s time spent, budget, clicks, or conversions.

Bid adjustments allow you to increase or decrease your bids based on performance. You can even make these adjustments based on different categories, like device, demographics, language, and more.

 

If you notice specific keywords performing better on mobile than desktop, then you can adjust the bid, on a percentage level, higher for mobile sites, since they are converting better.

 

Custom Ad Scheduling can be setup through an ad scheduling system in the Google Ads platform. This allows full control over the specific time and day you want your ads to appear on.

 

If your target audience is more active online during the weekend, then you should set your budget higher on the weekends to show your ads in front of them more often during those peak times.

Conclusion

Pay-per-click advertising is a multi-faceted marketing strategy that can offer a massive reach to grow your business in 2020 and beyond.

In order to continually run profitable Google Ads means to consistently check, optimize, and innovate your ads and message to produce a long-term marketing solution for your business.

 

At Rival Digital Marketing, we believe in creating consistent and effective campaigns to grow your business using PPC.

If you’re struggling with creating and managing these ad campaigns for your business, don’t hesitate to reach out to one of our PPC management specialists who can help create profitable ad campaigns for your business.

 

Give us a call at (1-314-384-5025) or contact us online here.