Optimising your PPC Campaign for Success

Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing is a popular way to use search engine advertising in order to generate traffic to your website.In fact, it’s one of the most commonly used methods of advertising online.

What is PPC?

Essentially, PPC is a way of buying visits to your site rather than trying to attract traffic organically.  And, let’s face it, getting your site ranked on search engines like Google organically can take a lot of time, resources, and an in-depth knowledge of how websites are put together.

The concept is simple – rather than paying a fee to place your advert, every time someone clicks on your ad, you pay a small, pre-agreed fee to the search engine. Your PPC strategy can use a whole host of paid media platforms, including Google AdWords, Bing Ads and Facebook ads, in order to reach out to a carefully targeted audience, build brand awareness, enhance revenue, and optimise campaign results.

In PPC, you can choose the keywords or phrases that you want your website to be associated with when a search is performed. By carefully selecting these keywords, you’ll be advertising to people who are already interested in what you have to offer. Once you’ve chosen your keywords and phrases, you’ll then need to select how much you’re willing to pay each time someone clicks on the search result.

PPC ads are typically listed at the top of the results page, alongside organic search listings. When someone clicks on your ad, you’ll pay the current cost per click from your budget and, once your entire budget has been used, your ads won’t run until you’ve replenished your funds.

The Benefits of PPC

Pay Per Click advertising offers a whole host of benefits over generating organic traffic.

• Speed to Market

Firstly, your ads will usually start popping up as quickly as just a few hours after the campaign has been set up, this allows you to start seeing immediate results. It’s worth noting, however, that as soon as you stop paying for your ads, they’ll stop showing as immediately as they appeared.

• Reach

PPC ads send additional traffic to your website, which will expand your online visibility and help to establish your company as a leader within your industry or sector.

• Highly targeted traffic

Because you can assign different ads to different keywords and phrases, your campaign can be highly targeted resulting in high quality traffic being driven to your site.

• Test before you invest

PPC is a low risk way to test for key words, allowing you to determine whether or not a full site optimisation campaign is worth the investment.

• Optimise ROI

With PPC, you only pay when one of your ads is clicked, making it easy to manage costs, track conversions, and determine your ROI.

But just because your Pay Per Click campaigns are getting plenty of clicks, doesn’t mean that these clicks are converting to end results. No matter how successful your campaign appears to be in terms of number of clicks, it’s what happens after the click that truly counts.

Optimising your PPC strategy beyond the initial click

Understand your aims

If you want to ensure that your strategy is effective, before you launch your PPC campaign, you need to ensure that you fully understand your aims – what do you actually want to achieve from the campaign? Why are you setting it up in the first place? And we don’t just mean achieve loads  of clicks…they’re just the means to an end. What do you want your audience to do once they’ve clicked? What is the overarching purpose of the campaign? A form fill? A phone call? A purchase? Simply to communicate a key message to your potential audience? Once you fully understand your aim, you’ll be able to put together a strategy, a call to action and a customer journey that supports your objectives.

It’s about more than just top-level metrics

So you’ve implemented your PPC campaign and the results are looking great – you’ve managed to achieve high click-through rates and outstanding conversion rates, all for a low cost per click. What more could you want? Well the fact is that these metrics, as impressive as they may be, don’t tell the whole story.

After all, just because you’ve had hundreds or thousands of clicks on your site, doesn’t mean that any one has actually converted to a customer and bought your product.

This leads us nicely on to…

Ensure the customer journey is in place to back up your ads

Once your potential customers have clicked on your ads, its vital that everything is in place to make their conversion journey seamless and straightforward. The last thing you want is for your leads to be sent to an unresponsive website, get added to an email list that’s never actually used, or find that the product they are hoping to buy isn’t actually available.

To avoid these issues and optimise conversion rates, make sure that you define your user journey before your PPC strategy goes live, test the entire user experience, and understand the entire process behind converting prospective customer into secured revenue.

To ensure that the entire journey is optimised, it’s important to consider the following for each type of Call to Action:

• Call to Action: Phone Call – Who’s going to answer the phone? Will they be equipped with the necessary knowledge and skills to move the lead onto the next stage of the journey? Do you have enough call handlers to manage a potential influx in calls as a result o the campaign, without an increase in wait times?
• Call to Action: Form Fill – Is there an established and tested drip campaign that is ready to nurture your leads into customers? How long, on average, does it take to convert a new lead into a revenue?
• Call to Action: Purchase – Is the product you’re promoting actually available? Has the website been tested to ensure a simple, straightforward, and positive user experience? Is every aspect of the site UX optimised? Is there a remarketing tag in place that will allow you to recapture a lead who abandons their cart? Do you have an ad campaign in place to engage with and retain the customer after the initial sale?

Here at Peaky Digital, we specialise in creating effective digital marketing campaigns that not only inspire action, but also achieve optimum results. If you have any questions about how we can help you to drive your start up business forward in the digital world, please do not hesitate to get in touch.

Our friendly and helpful team is on hand to answer any of your questions and we always go that extra mile to deliver digital marketing solutions that meet your objectives and requirements.