Our top five do’s and don’ts for successful PPC campaigns
PPC marketing can have a big impact on the success of your business. In fact, many companies use PPC campaigns to:
- Increase brand awareness
- Generate quality leads; and
- Maximise sales
Businesses utilising PPC campaigns effectively will likely find that their products and services are getting in front of the right audience. But, without the proper knowledge and experience, you might find it difficult to know where to start.
That’s why we’ve highlighted our top five do’s and don’ts when running a PPC campaign. Our blog will help you avoid common PPC pitfalls and remind you of the best practices.
Do set specific campaign goals
Every marketing campaign needs objectives and goals. Without them, it’s difficult to benchmark success and understand how effective your campaign has been.
I asked one of our Senior PPC Executive, Olly Breheny, what his top tip would be when running a PPC campaign:
“Campaign specific goals are important to train the machine learning in the exact objective of each campaign, If you have various conversion goals set to both monetary and non monetary goals its important. PMAX with misaligned campaign goals can result in poor placements and a lack of core results such as revenue.”
So, before you begin any PPC campaign, sit down and consider what you want to achieve. If your goal is to drive conversions, assess what you need in order to do so. For example, you might want to employ more compelling ad copy, or increase your use of relevant keywords.
Do customise your campaign
The best part of PPC marketing is that you can customise your campaigns to align with the customers you want to reach. Most platforms, such as Google Ads, allow you to target your audience based on several demographics, including:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
Doing so will help you save time in the long run, as you know that the ads you create will get in front of the right people. For example, if you provide services in the North West, it makes sense to ensure your ads target customers within this region, rather than Southern England.
Do use negative keywords
Exact-match keywords are important in every PPC campaign. But, it’s vital you don’t underestimate the use of negative keywords as well.
Negative keywords allow you to exclude certain terms in your campaigns. So, your ads won’t be shown to the wrong audiences. This helps you generate higher-quality leads and avoid wasted ad-spend.
Bonus Tip from Olly:
“My number one tip would be to ensure that your tracking is set up correctly, without it you’re running the campaign blind. Ensure that your conversions are firing correctly, not double counting and that the conversion actions themselves are relevant to your business goals – optimising towards page views won’t help you drive more sales.”
Don’t do too much at once
Casting the net out wide with your bidding strategies might seem like a good idea, but it actually does more harm than good.
For example, not every word related to your campaign will be relevant to your product or service. Consequently, bidding on them will lead to wasted time and ad-spend. Not to mention, it could also lower your quality score – making bidding on keywords more difficult in the future.
Don’t forget to measure success
How can you be sure your PPC campaign is successful, if you don’t record how it’s performing? That’s why you must ensure you use tracking tools that demonstrate the efficacy of your campaign.
For example, if your campaign goal is to increase brand awareness, use Google Search Console to note the impressions your landing pages have received over the campaign period.
Need help getting started? Turn to our PPC experts
A dedicated PPC Team can take the weight of marketing off your shoulders. We are more than happy to share how your own PPC campaigns might benefit from an in-depth review & action plan. We’ll even see it through to demonstrate how you can dominate the market.
Interested? Get in touch today.
FAQs
Answered by Tom McGuigan
How can PPC campaigns be tailored to goals?
PPC campaigns can be tailored based on how you set up and structure the campaign itself. With the bidding strategy, ad/asset groups, keywords/shopping products, match types, bid adjustments, audiences, and location/device targeting, you can direct your campaign targeting in a certain way in order to give you the chance of achieving your desired goals.
What is an example of a negative keyword?
A negative keyword is a keyword that you exclude from a specific campaign or ad group in order to not trigger your ads when people search for this term. An example would be excluding the term “red shoes” if you were a business that exclusively sold blue shoes.
What is a quality score?
Quality Score is essentially a metric that assesses how relevant your keyword is to your website landing page and ad. Google gives keywords higher ratings if it deems there to be a high degree of relevance between the three. It’s essentially to deprioritise businesses that are using high search volume keywords to direct people to their website if the keyword isn’t relevant to their overall offerings.
How many ads should a business be running at once?
There isn’t really a one-size-fits-all fits all for a number of ads being run. It entirely depends on how many products/services your business offers, how much budget you’ve got to work with, and the industry that you’re working in. If you have product categories with wildly differing margins, search volumes, and order values, then it may be worth segmenting these fully, whereas if there is more alignment across these three metrics, then it may be worth consolidating them to allow for better and faster data accrual to aid bidding within the platform.
