Five PPC Strategy Tips

Five PPC Strategy Tips

How to Get the Most Out of Your PPC Advertising Campaign

Pay Per Click is a great tool to help you achieve better search positions in a matter of hours. Use these simple tips to get the most from your campaign.

Pay-per-click (PPC) is, without doubt, one of the top tools for getting big results fast in your SEO campaign. It therefore comes as something of a surprise that so many people give PPC a try and come away with burnt fingers, sore wallets and no long-term results.

This is because there is far more to an effective PPC strategy than investing money in a basic Adwords campaign and watching your company soar to the top of the rankings. A successful campaign needs the skills and expertise that a professional provider of PPC services can bring. It takes time and determination to get it right, and it also has to work properly alongside other strategies, such as content marketing and organic SEO.

With the right infrastructure in place, the following tips will help you get the best results and a good return on your investment.

Use Adwords “search terms” function to optimise your keyword bidding

Beneath the Dimensions tab in Adwords, you will see an option entitled “search terms” that provides some telling information. It shows the exact search queries that have triggered your ad, and the results almost always come as a surprise.

You can use this information to optimise your keyword bidding and make your campaign far more efficient.

Use a combination of exact match and modified broad match bidding to gradually refine your terms further. As its name suggests, exact match gives precise search phrases, while modified broad match uses stand-alone keywords that must be included in the search query. The latter will initially generate unwanted hits, but if you keep working on it, the results can be remarkable.

Also look at negative keywords

The information you have found under search terms tells you just as much about the keywords you do not want as it does about the ones that are useful to you.

So, it is equally important to optimise your negative keywords as your positive ones. You can add these by selecting the option at the bottom of the Keywords tab in Adwords.

Take care only to discard those words that are definitely undesirable. It is easy to get a little over-enthusiastic with the negative keywords, and to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Make use of ad extensions

Ad extensions are free tools that can make a big difference to your ad. They provide additional pieces of information, typically contact details or extra web links. The extensions also make your ad more visible, so it really makes sense to make use of these tools.

Note that extensions are set across a campaign basis, so make sure the information is relevant to all the ad groups in the campaign. As with most things, it makes sense to experiment with different extensions to find out what works best.

Think about split-testing your ad copy

A common mistake is to dive into a PPC campaign with “an ad.” Ideally, an ad group should be running at least two and up to five variations.

This is known as split testing, and is an ideal way of getting the wording exactly right for the best click through rates. Again, it takes time, research and persistence to get it right.

Peel ‘n’ stick can make it better

The phrase “peel ‘n’ stick” was originally coined by online marketing guru Perry Marshall, and is a great way of optimising your campaign once it is up and running. The idea is to take those keywords that are not performing so well and create a more relevant group where they will work.

This method ultimately brings you a set of highly focused ad groups, all working as they should within well defined target segments.