Small business owners are not particularly keen on pouring money into paid online advertising, especially considering the many variables at play and the relative difficulty in measuring the campaigns’ overall ROI.
This reluctance is not unfounded — a bad PPC campaign can cost a pretty penny, and a good one requires a skilled team of digital marketing professionals from a ppc marketing agency. This is why many SMBs choose to stick to less financially demanding tactics, such as sending out personalized emails, posting on social media, and creating SEO-optimized blog content.
While the tactics mentioned above are certainly worth investing in, you shouldn’t be so quick to disregard PPC, as it can help you achieve your sales goals, provided that you do it right. To do that, you’ll first need to be able to evaluate the performance of your PPC campaign and learn how to maximize its potential.
We gathered experts from various companies dealing with web design company florida and collected their advice on monitoring your PPC campaign and what you can do to boost its success rate. Let’s begin!
What Can You Do to Make Sure Your PPC Campaign Is Working?
Before diving into the tactics that you can employ to improve your campaign’s performance, let’s talk about what you can do to gauge the success of your current PPC efforts.
Monitor Your Clicks and Click-Through Rate
The first and most important indicators to monitor for measuring the success of your PPC campaign are your clicks and your click-through rate (CTR). Being aware of the number of clicks your ads receive over a given period is a crucial early indicator of how well your ads are performing against the competition and whether they can capture your target audience’s attention.
You might think that clicks and CTR are one and the same, but that’s not exactly true. The latter is even more helpful in presenting information regarding the effectiveness of your PPC campaign.
While clicks show the absolute number of clicks your ads receive, the click-through rate indicates the number of clicks divided by the number of times your ads are shown to potential customers. This is a crucial metric, helping you identify the listings, ads, and keywords you may need to improve, as well as those you should not mess around with.
Analyze Other Key KPIs
While clicks and CTR are arguably the most important performance indicators for PPC campaigns, there are many others you need to monitor. The following key performance indicators (KPIs) will give you all the necessary information on how your campaign is doing:
- Conversion rate
- Impression share
- Cost per click
- Cost per acquisition
- Quality score
- Bounce rate
- Average position in search results
If you want to get a comprehensive overview of your campaign’s performance, you’ll need to monitor all of the above and even a few more.
Integrate a CRM Tool
Another excellent way to track your PPC progress is to combine your Google Ads profile with a CRM tool, which allows you to analyze all kinds of relevant data. Most CRMs will allow you to set profit targets as well.
Combining a CRM with Google Ads will provide you with valuable data on productivity, pipeline performance, customer satisfaction, and many other vital parameters. With this, you will be empowered to generate an optimized PPC campaign and boost your ROI.
Keep Testing
The fourth and final piece of advice we have when it comes to monitoring the success of your PPC campaign is simple — keep testing. To truly maximize your ROI and optimize your campaigns, you’ll need to conduct continuous and meticulous A/B testing.
If you can do this, you’ll have a much higher chance of optimizing your headlines, keeping them catchy and concise, but also leading the prospects to conversion through the use of relevant keywords and great product pages.
Test how your ad descriptions drive customers to landing pages and keep making improvements to elevate the quality of your website and drive more traffic toward it.
How Can I Maximize My PPC Investment?
As you monitor and test your PPC campaign’s performance, you’ll come to realize that launching this type of campaign is only the beginning. Far from being a quick fix, a PPC campaign requires lots of commitment, both in terms of time, and resources, to track and monitor performance.
Unless you’re meticulously measuring performance and comparing it to results achieved from other channels, you’ll have no way of knowing what works and what should be dropped. There will be no way for you to identify the tactics to use to improve your PPC campaign.
It’s all about adaptability.
Even the most robust PPC campaign is a ticking time bomb. It will eventually fail due to changes to the ad platform, customer behavior, competition stepping up its game, or another form of a market shift.
The rest of this guide will focus on how to improve your PPC performance, maximizing your investment. You can use any of these tactics to improve campaign performance regardless of the size and reach of your brand. Let’s begin!
Perform High-Quality Keyword Research
Any successful PPC marketing campaign rests on the shoulders of excellent keywords.
So, as is the case with many other digital marketing strategies, you’ll need to utilize keyword research to learn not only how to structure your ad groups and campaigns but what to advertise in the first place. With a PPC campaign, the search terms you choose to target will significantly impact your overall costs, so doing keyword research is doubly essential.
Here are a few things to consider when doing keyword research:
- Choose keywords that fit your budget — It might be tempting to go for a few expensive targets and spend all your money there. However, diversification is your friend here, and you don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket. Instead, try to spread your budget out sensibly and target a broader range of less-expensive but valuable keywords.
- Choose keywords according to your goals — As always, goals need to be the guiding light of your PPC campaign. You might set many different goals for your advertising campaign, including reaching more newsletter subscribers, increasing revenue, driving more traffic to your site, etc. Choose the keywords that will help you strategically achieve your primary goal.
- Vary your keyword selection — Keywords vary, both in terms of length and searcher intent. Your best bet is to mix different keyword types into your PPC targets. Shorter keywords tend to lead to less relevant traffic but generally have higher search volumes. On the other hand, longer keywords lead to stronger results but are less frequently used.
A top-quality keyword research tool could be the factor that determines the success of a PPC campaign. If you can build a winning keyword strategy, you should have no problem running a successful campaign — in fact, you’re almost guaranteed one.
Be Careful with Scaling
Take your time scaling your PPC campaign. It needs to happen naturally, at the right time and place. If you scale too quickly, the explosive growth could be challenging to tame. That said, you certainly don’t want to be sitting on your laurels and missing out on opportunities when they do present themselves.
The most important thing is to remain calm and grounded when your budget inevitably skyrockets. Only spend more money on your PPC campaign if and when it makes sense.
The only way to achieve this “zen” approach to scaling is to have a budgeting plan in place before you reach a certain profit level. Having your route planned takes a lot of stress out of the picture and allows you to focus on what matters.
Expand to New Opportunities
Once you have the budget to scale your PPC campaign, you should not simply pump more money into the tried and tested strategies you know are effective. What you’ll want to do is allocate some of your budget to trying out new approaches and reaching new audiences.
Sure, in the beginning, your campaign will largely be determined by the size of your budget. You’ll have to spend very wisely and even pinch pennies to get the best ROI.
However, as you begin to scale up, you’ll be able to loosen your grip on the budget. Don’t be afraid to use the extra money to experiment a bit.
Explore new audience segments, ad messages, keywords, etc. You never know what strategy might click and begin producing never-before-seen results. In short, some reasonable risks are perfectly acceptable once you have a little more money to spend.
Wrapping Up
When you decide to start a PPC campaign, you need to approach it responsibly. One of the best ways to do this is hiring a professional PPC management company, as the professionals employed in these organizations know how to bring you success in the digital landscape.
With their help, you’ll be able to set optimistic yet realistic goals for your company and create a plan to achieve them in a timely manner. Go into your PPC campaign with a clear goal in mind, and you’re more than likely to succeed.
Author’s bio:
Danny Wilson is a digital marketing specialist and a content writer at Digital Strategy One. Focused around SEO, he is also dedicated to creating high quality content for social media and marketing in general.