How to increase PPC ad visibility and lower CPC (cost-per-click)
When marketers talk about a successful PPC campaign, what they really mean is a campaign which produces the highest CTR (click-through-rate) at the lowest CPC (cost-per-click) for the company advertising their product or service.
The effectiveness (in other words, the visibility) of your ads is measured using Google’s Quality Score tool which rates the quality and relevance of both your keywords and PPC ads. Google then uses this data to determine your CPC from which it can determine your ad rank in the ad auction process.
As you’d expect, the higher your quality score the better your ads place in rankings which in turn lowers the cost per click. This makes your campaigns more cost-effective and boosts your business’s profitability.
Proof of PPC’s success
A common hack used amongst PPC specialists is to include negative keywords to prevent certain words or phrases triggering your ad so that it isn’t shown to anyone searching that phrase. This saves you money by not wasting ad spend on leads who have no interest in purchasing your product or service.
Although SEO is a key component of boosting your site’s visibility on the world wide web, it’s been proven that paid traffic channels do provide faster returns than organic ones. Therefore, as long as you’re creating and implementing an effective strategy, PPC can be worth the extra monetary investment on your end in order to target specific demographics and increase your conversion rates.
From adapting your bidding strategy to contextualising your PPC ads with negative keywords, there’s a whole list of smart things you can do to make your PPC budget go further while optimising your ad content for maximum brand visibility.
1. Meet your match with ad relevance
Ad relevance is the term used to describe how closely an ad campaign matches a user’s search. This is determined by the relationship between keywords, ads and the landing page. Strong relevance would be when the search keywords can be found directly in the ad’s headline.
This is important for your PPC visibility because a higher relevance directly relates to a higher quality score, which in turn lowers the cost-per-click of your ads. Likewise, the expected click-through-rate and landing page experience can also impact the quality score.
2. Man your ads yourself with manual bidding
It’s no doubt that automated bidding strategies have been on the rise as of late, and with good reason. Otherwise known as conversion-based bidding, auto-bids triggers your budget spend in relation to actual search queries using auction-time technology. It includes a range of factors such as users’ device, location, time zone and language to determine when to spend.
However, there is something that automated bidding doesn’t do that manual bidding does and that is give you control over your budget and ad spend. Unlike with automated bidding, in which Google adjusts the bid amount automatically, with manual bidding you can set the maximum CPC yourself. This also means that if you notice your ads are underperforming, you can make quick adjustments.
One of the most effective manual bidding strategies for visibility is vCPM (cost per thousand viewable impressions). This is where you can set your desired bids so that you pay for every 1,000 impressions rather than every individual time someone clicks on it. In terms of visibility this is useful because it means that you only pay when your ads can be seen.
3. Remarket rather than remake
Maybe you’re targeting a new, more specific audience, or maybe you’re trying to optimise your site through PPC after a Google penalty has wiped you from the SERP. Whatever your reason, a budget friendly option to maximise your ad campaign is to remarket your existing ads rather than trying to build a whole new campaign from scratch.
This is a great way to make sure your ads remain relevant whether for a specific seasonal trend or for the rapidly evolving digital market in general by responding to what your potential customers are looking for. That information then enables you to make more informed decisions about how to advertise your brand. It’s also a useful strategy to nudge buyers who might be lingering around the middle of the purchase process to completing the purchase by converting to a paying customer.
For example, if you’re advertising Christmas deals in your ads in December, by the time the new year rolls around you’ll want to make sure you’ve remarketed so that people aren’t still getting out-of-date holiday offers in January.
The other important aspect of remarketing your ads for your target audience is to create a segment list. Otherwise known as Custom Segments, this refers to ways of categorising groups of customers through data analysis in order to target more specific customer profiles in your remarketing process. The types of customer segment might include demographic, behavioural, psychographic, geographic, technographic, firmographic or transactional.
Vying for visibility
Here at Embryo, we pride ourselves on seeing what others don’t. However, when it comes to your PPC ads, it’s all about increasing your visibility. And not just that, but presenting your product and services to the most likely buyers through careful audience targeting and keyword research. By prioritising customer engagement, you’ll be able to maintain relevancy and stick to a realistic budget in order to see a profitable ROI.
We hope this advice was helpful. If you have any questions or want to talk to an expert about increasing your PPC visibility, get in touch today.
