Are you looking to increase brand awareness and website traffic? If you have a limited marketing budget, pay per click advertising is a great option. As the name alludes, pay per click (PPC) advertising utilizes keywords that triggers your ad to appear in search engine results, and you only pay when someone clicks the ad.
A well-executed PPC campaign can be a great way to increase business awareness and acquire customers without having to pay much. However, if you execute your pay per click campaign poorly, you will find it is ineffective and you will end up paying for clicks that don’t turn into sales. Here are few tips to help optimize the effectiveness of your pay per word campaign:
- Create a strategic budget. Determine a budget of how much you can spend on each click. Many PPC providers allow you to name how much you will spend on each click and ranks the ads based on your bid. If your product sells for $25, and one in every five clicks you get converts to a purchase, you want to make sure your PPC rate is less than $5.
- Use negative keywords. While having broad keywords might increase your exposure, it will lead to clicks from users who aren’t going to buy your product, which costs you money. You can use negative words to filter out searches that won’t lead to conversions. For example, if your keywords are “website design” you might set “free” as a negative keyword, so your ad doesn’t appear for “free website design” searches which will not lead to sales.
- Use long tail keywords. A long tail keyword is a string of three or four words that targets the search queries specifically ready to purchase your product. In our web design example, you might draw more clicks with the term, “web design” but your PPC costs and conversion rate will be a lot better if you used the long tail keywords, “hiring a web designer.”
- Run split testing. One way to find the most successful keywords is to launch two different keywords at the same time and then review which has the most the higher instances of clicks and conversion rate. You can delete the less successful keyword, and reverse engineer the winning one to figure out what works and duplicate it.
- Consider professional PPC management to get your campaign started. You are probably great at the business you offer, but you may not have the marketing knowledge to give your PPC campaign enough success to make the cost worthwhile. Professional PPC management companies dedicate their entire existence to optimizing conversion rates with pay per click marketing and can run a more successful campaign than a person trying to figure it out on their own. If you are concerned about the added cost of professional PPC management services, consider the cost of paying for clicks that will never lead to sales because your campaign is not being run by someone who can maximize the value of each click you pay for.
- Collaborate with other businesses using PPC marketing. This is where you come in. If you’re reading this, it is probably because you are using pay per click advertising for your business. What works for you? Do you have any tips to share with other businesses? Please provide your input in the comment section below.