Even though nearly half of small businesses now use paid ads, pay-per-click (PPC) is still a foreign concept for many of us, which we can’t afford to ignore. Therefore, to survive in the marketing world, it has become necessary that you too get acquainted with PPC skills and strategies. Also, strategically crafted PPC campaigns can prove lucrative for your business almost instantly once the ads start running, as they bring in more traffic, leads, and customers.

However, not everyone can design successful PPC campaigns as it requires a lot of planning and strategizing to ensure that you enjoy all its advantages. So, here are some “golden rules” to help you create an effective and lucrative pay-per-click campaign strategy.

Achievable Business Goals

Identifying your business goals beforehand is great for measuring your success against something once your PPC campaign is up and running. It acts as a foundation for a successful PPC campaign, as well as your other marketing strategies, and failing to determine your company’s goals can make your business’s foothold weak.

You can consider the following questions to formulate your business goals effectively; these can help you narrow down your goals and help you develop a consequential and appropriate PPC marketing campaign.

•        Your PPC campaign aims to fulfill which goal of your company? For example, increase your blog subscriptions, brand awareness, increased sales, email sign-ups, etc.
• What actions would you want your targeted audience to take when they visit your site/ landing page?

Identify Targeted Audience

A PPC campaign’s main purpose is to lure in a ‘targeted’ audience to your website and effectively convert them into potential leads and loyal customers. So, it is necessary to identify your targeted audience before you start planning about keywords and creating ads. This will help you design better targeted ads, landing pages, and other essential elements to directly target your audience, making your PPC campaigns successful and saving your marketing dollars.

You can do so by asking the following questions-

• Who you are targeting?
• If you are B2B or B2C?
• Why do you think your target audience needs your product/service?
• What keywords would your audience use while searching for your kind of products/services?
• Where does your potential audience reside mainly?
• Which device is most preferred by your audience?

Best Campaigning Channel

It is highly recommended to focus on the following three main things before selecting your PPC advertising channel—company goals, budget, target audience. However, starting your PPC campaign with Google Ad is perhaps the most feasible, as it is easy to set up and relatively inexpensive.

Many PPC campaign platforms may boast of lower cost-per-click (CPC), but can fail to offer you access to a larger audience. Therefore, you should give a thorough thought about choosing any marketing channel and must compare the qualities of each of the channels with your business goals in mind before investing in them.

Also, if you have funds to spare, you can also run your ads on more than one PPC channel to determine the best option for you.

Impressive Keyword Strategy

Paying attention and monitoring the performance of your keywords should of utmost priority. You can place higher bids on the keywords that are getting profitable results for your campaign, and eliminate or reduce bid for others.

• Selecting keywords

Select around one to five keywords per ad group that is closely aligned with your ad group’s specific theme, from a set of your keywords to target as that’s how search engines work. Also, make sure that those keywords are extremely relevant to maintain your Quality Score. You should create a separate ad group for keywords you want to target that fall outside of one theme.

• Negative keywords

You can also use negative keywords to help eliminate unqualified traffic. Such a keyword list tells search engines what you don’t want to rank for—which is equally as important as the other way round.

Attractive Ad Copy

Your next concern after ensuring all the above points should be to develop strong and creative ad copies. It doesn’t matter if your ads are being published on different platforms, PPC advertising just needs to be creative and approachable.

Make sure that your ad copy is well-written and concise and to attract and captivate your targeted audience. Also, since only a specific number of characters is allowed for each ad copy, refrain from wasting your time and money on pointless characters, instead make your headline count to grab your audience’s attention.

Further, to ensure maximum success and effectiveness of your PPC campaigns, remember the following in regard to your ad copies must-

• Attractive and relevant through the right keywords
• Informative, engaging and yet focused
• Concise but with all necessary details

Optimize Landing Page

The most important element of a successful PPC campaign is to develop a fully optimized landing page that would greet your visitors.

A landing page is the main page where the user is directed to after they have clicked on your advert. Since the main purpose of a landing page is to convert the user into a potential lead or customer, the page needs to be highly targeted and extremely relevant to your ad.

A landing page allows the real action to occur because it attracts users to buy or subscribe, so the page must deliver what was promised and offer a seamless experience to the visitor. For an efficient PPC campaign, you should create multiple landing pages, test them to see which gets more potential conversions and keep optimizing them.

Also, remember the following crucial characteristics of a luring landing page-

• Quick page loading time
• Relevant content to the product or service as mentioned on the ad copy
• A call-to-action coinciding with the ad
• Feature price, shipping costs and other FAQs

Bid Adjustments

Don’t have a rigid approach to PPC campaigns. Embrace bid adjustments as they allow you to increase or decrease your bids based on performance. These adjustments can be made based on different categories, including demographics, language, device, and more.

Bottom Line

Therefore, Pay-Per-Click is a crucial marketing strategy, which when planned smartly can promise brand recognition, an excellent online presence, and a steady inflow of new leads and website traffic in no time.