For businesses on a small budget, PPC marketing can be a very effective way to reach potential customers. In fact, it’s often more effective than other types of paid PPC marketing. Here are nine useful tips for maximizing your PPC budget.
-
Use Long Tail Keywords
If your landing page or website doesn’t match up to their expectations when they get there, though, they will bounce quickly and probably never return. This means that attention to detail is crucial if you want to succeed in PPC marketing. Every detail from headline to call-to-action needs to be carefully crafted.
In addition, it generates many navigation clicks on your ad, which increases your ad spend and reduces your return on investment.
Focusing on a specialty or a specific aspect of your service attracts customers who are ready to make a decision about your business.
-
Generic Keywords in Your PPC Campaigns
Using negative keywords in conjunction with your long-tail keywords is a very effective way to focus your PPC marketing efforts.
Continuing with the ‘running shoes’ example above, eliminate unwanted clicks by adding terms such as:
- Cheaper / Affordable / Affordable Running Shoes.
- Retro fashion in retro / novelty running shoes.
- Running shoes from a specific brand.
Google allows you to easily add negative keywords to your specific PPC campaigns, with up to 5,000 words for each list.
-
Reward Your Best Artists
If one of your PPC campaigns is doing particularly well, focus on that broader selection.
The objective is to find the keywords with a good performance, which are also uncompetitive and cheaper.
-
Content Is King
In comparison to SEO, where content is king, paid search is a little different. In my experience, you can have phenomenal content that’s optimized for PPC and it won’t do you any good. But if your ad copy is compelling and in line with what a searcher is looking for in a second or two, they will click on your ad over another one.
-
In Your PPC Campaigns, Everything Is in Time
Running your PPC ads 24/7 only leads to a waste of money.
In your PPC campaigns, it is good practice to calculate the optimal time to show your ads and turn it off or reduce your bid outside these hours.
For example, if you are looking to sell vacation packages to families, see if your target demographic makes purchases on Tuesdays at 10 am or on Sunday nights.
Activate research-based keywords or your lowest-cost search terms for part of the day. Most people do research during business hours.
For proven, high-volume, expensive keywords, it’s more effective to identify the most likely time your target audience will see your ad.
-
Offer The Right Offer
Different bidding strategies are best used for different end goals:
- CPM (Cost Per Thousand) – Best for maximizing your ad impressions and increasing visibility.
- CPC / CPV (Cost Per Click / View): ideal to optimize the cost you want to pay per click or view in your ads or videos
- Maximize Clicks – A useful way to get the most out of a limited budget for individual clicks on an ad.
- CPA (Cost Per Acquisition): designed to maximize your website conversions
Work with your PPC marketing strategy, budget, and advertising goals to optimize your bidding strategy in the way that works best for you.
-
Aim for Variations in Your PPC Campaigns
Add a completely different dimension to your PPC marketing campaign strategy.
Variations can be phrases or terms that only some people use, perhaps in specific places or dialects.
The goal is to target a market or method that is likely to produce low search volume, but may be interesting in a niche market.
For instance:
Focus phrase: vacation packages for families.
Variations:
- I need some vacations.
- Where will I go on vacation this year?
- Tell me where should I take my family in August.
- Where can I go on inexpensive summer vacations.
Focus phrase: shoes
Variations:
- Find me shoes that won’t break in six months.
- Shoes that are ecologically sustainable.
As you can see, many of the suggested variations are optimized for voice search, a growing industry.
-
Use The DKI (Dynamic Keyword Insertion)
The dynamic keyword insertion is a clever little feature, which is actually very easy to use and can be a useful way to change your ads.
If you sell multiple products or services and want to create an ad that matches your customers’ search, add a code snippet to your ad.
This snippet contains information that you can use to change the keyword that is displayed in your ad.
For example, if you have a store that sells coffee, you might want to change the title from:
- Buy the best quality keyword: coffee
- Buy the best quality Java coffee
- Buy the best quality Italian coffee
Control Your Clicks On Your PPC Campaigns
No matter what your industry or your
PPC marketing budget is, your ad is affected by what Google calls invalid clicks.
It refers to any click on your ad that is not from a genuine human or multiple clicks from the same source.
As part of the best practices for any of your PP PPC marketing campaigns, controlling the sources of those clicks saves you a great deal of money.
To protect yourself from this, the manual solution is to monitor IP addresses, timestamps, and user agents. Doing so helps you identify whether there has been automated or fraudulent activity from a specific source.
By incorporating this type of software into your PPC marketing strategy, you can save up to 25% of fraudulent clicks.
