The world of advertising has changed unrecognisably. At the forefront of that change is pay per click (PPC) advertising. However, PPC is still an advertising concept that bewilders many marketers.
For many businesses, small and large, PPC offers a lifeline in terms of generating leads, fuelling conversions and retaining customers. In today’s ever-changing economic landscape, a robust PPC strategy is more important than ever.
PPC advertising has many benefits. Chief among them is the ability to reach your target audience with greater precision and effect. Paid advertising can help you rise to the top of the search results in a competitive landscape. Especially if your targeting is on point and you’ve selected the right keywords.
With so many companies targeting the same keywords, a PPC strategy needs to be increasingly comprehensive. Many PPC agencies are taking note. PPC experts at Equation Digital, a leading paid advertising agency, shared insight into creating an effective PPC strategy:
“Ensure your PPC landing pages are relevant and well optimised, ensure your ad text is enticing and features your target keywords and ensure the structure of your campaign has been set up properly. These considerations can help boost your quality score [and lower] your CPC.”
As you can see, getting to grips with your PPC strategy is essential for success.
Create your strategy
If you’re a small business, you might be going it alone with your PPC efforts initially. To ensure you succeed with your future PPC advertising campaign, we have pulled together our guide to help inform your strategy.
Below, you’ll find the steps to follow for a great PPC strategy:
Set your goals
To save money and maximise your PPC ad spend, you will need to set your goals and budget before you do anything else on your campaign.
Decide what you want to achieve with your PPC efforts. Whether it’s driving traffic, building brand awareness or generating conversions, this will help you work within your budgets.
Do your competitor and keyword research
Competitor research is crucial in all aspects of business – especially so in PPC. Generate a thorough understanding of which keywords your competitors are targeting and who. You can then build your unique PPC strategy to compete with and surpass their efforts.
Target the right audience
As a business, you should already have a very clear understanding of who your target audience is. You will need to clearly define this in PPC so your ads are shown to the right people, at the right time.
Create your target personas for the campaign and ensure that your keywords complement these users.
Optimise content and landing pages
To support your PPC ads, you will need landing pages and content that supports your PPC messaging. This will ensure your users land on a highly relevant information, and you don’t end up losing conversions.
This stage of your strategy can take time, but it’s worth the investment.
Testing and measuring
Once your PPC campaign is live, you will need to consistently track, test and measure your ads for effectiveness. A/B testing is one way to check which ads work.
Finally, a deep dive into your paid ads analytics will help you assess how users have interacted with your campaign.
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