With the wealth of quality PPC providers out there these days, it can be hard to find those diamonds in the rough. You know what we mean—those truly exceptional PPC companies that drive tremendous growth for their clients through innovative strategies and creative outreach. Choosing a provider can be daunting, but to make things easier, we’ve compiled our top five strategies currently in use by the top PPC companies in the game:
1. Optimize Quality Score
The most effective PPC marketers have a deep understanding of pay-per-click strategies, particularly those found in Google AdWords. With Google owning nearly 68 percent of total search engine market share, it makes sense that its PPC framework is what will generate the best revenue for advertisers. To that end, the first strategy utilized by the best PPC marketers is to optimize your AdWords Quality Score.
Google determines your cost-per-click as a function of Quality Score, your competitor’s ad ranking, and your total budget. Essentially, when your CTRs (click-through rates) underperform, your QS drops. Low QS scores mean higher CPCs, less impression share, and less ad visibility overall. Naturally, optimizing this score is a necessary part of achieving success with PPC advertising.
Your PPC provider should review its campaigns and prune the underperforming keywords and ads. Each dud can lessen the performance of the ad campaign, creating a snowball effect where all quality metrics are decreased and ROI becomes nonexistent. If your PPC company hasn’t updated your campaign to reflect the changing preferences of your audience, it’s your brand that will suffer.
2. Keyword Mastery
PPC marketing thrives on keywords. The best PPC companies understand this, and are constantly refining and adding more relevant keywords into their lists.
In particular, quality PPC companies effectively use long-tailed keywords in their outreach.
Long-tailed keywords:
- Offer less competition for organic search
- Cost you less for each click (as there are fewer people competing for them)
- Are better for pre-qualifying traffic for your sales funnel, leading to more conversions
But the best PPC businesses don’t stop at adding keywords, they also utilize negative keywords. For those unfamiliar with this strategy, negative keywords tell search engines that certain queries aren’t related to your ad, and prevents your brand from showing up in the search results. This prevents you from collecting ad impressions that will surely fail to drive sales, while saving your precious ad budget from unnecessary or accidental clicks. If your PPC campaign is underperforming, a lack of keyword strategy may be to blame.
3. Splitting Ad Groups
The best PPC companies understand that the crux of all marketing is targeting. No advertising campaign is effective if approached with a “shotgun” mentality; PPC campaigns least of all.
All PPC companies know that targeted ad groups are necessary to achieve a better ROI, but the companies that truly bring home the bacon split their ads into smaller, more relevant groups. This allows for better customization of specific landing pages with relevant ad text. Create specific calls-to-action for each landing page used to ensure maximum relevancy for the users who arrive.
4. Appeal to Emotion
Emotion-based content for ads and on-site copy can send CTR into overdrive. Leveraging this is tricky, though—only the top PPC agencies can generally pull it off.
Appealing to emotion means crafting your written content to impact your audience on a deeper level than simple ad copy can. Emotional content doesn’t seek to convert; it aims to make readers feel something. Positivity. Awe. Surprise. These can all be powerful ways to grab and keep the attention your audience, increasing CTR and better priming them for your sales funnel.
Pulling this off requires your PPC provider to have deep understanding of your target market. What problems is your audience facing? What do they value? What are they looking for when they search? Knowing the answers to these questions can turn an average PPC campaign into an exceptional one.
5. Remarketing
PPC campaigns are difficult to manage. Most conversion rates, even optimized ones, tend to be in the single digits. What better way to enhance your marketing than by getting your message back in front of all those lost customers?
Remarketing leverages the cookies stored in your user’s browser to spread the visibility of your ads to other web pages. By tracking their behavior, you can promote other ad strategies to target each customer in specific Google locations, like Gmail or Google+. Segment your audience and create specific ads for each stage. Utilize Google’s vast networks to reconnect with your users wherever possible to achieve the maximum ROI for your effort.
PPC Stepping Stones to Success
While these five points won’t guarantee success, they do enhance your campaign’s chances. It’s important to never rest on past laurels and consistently test and re-test new ideas that can help improve your market’s engagement with your advertising. Inbound marketing campaigns have proven very successful, and PPC powers a good portion of this success, but failing to track your metrics can result in wasted advertising dollars.