Over the past few years, digital marketing companies have seen the incredible growth of pay-per-click (PPC). More and more of their client companies are seeing the great potential of serving ads to users in real-time, which is why most experts agree that 2016 will see even more growth of this proven online advertising strategy.
Although organic search should still be a part of any business’ long-term strategy, it’s become increasingly more difficult to get to the top of the search results pages, especially with the introduction of more stringent search optimisation measures to provide better search results to users and with the saturation of the search market.
But with PPC, a company could have a better chance at gaining exposure and customer engagement.
If you’re looking to improve your business’ visibility in search or if you’re already using PPC and you feel that your campaign is underperforming, below are some useful tips for you:
Take advantage of Ad Extensions
Ad extensions have been added to most PPC campaigns to make the ads more relevant and useful for searchers. With ad extensions, searchers are given more options to easily interact with advertisers. Extensions allow you to add a phone number, website link and maps, among other things.
Use not one but multiple Ad Groups
If your company offers several products or services, or if your business has offices in several locations, you might want to set up multiple ad groups to make your ads specific, more relevant and more useful. You could set up a group for service A, B, and C or a group each for your locations, thus effectively targeting local customers and reducing your overall costs.
Consider using Call Only campaigns
This is especially useful for professionals such as lawyers and doctors, as well as for service providers. Call only campaigns allow your target customers to directly contact you. This saves them time, as it eliminates the need for them to go over your website to search for specific services that they require.
Take full advantage of PPC Remarketing
Chances are, you may have left some money on the table when a customer visited your site through your ads, considered buying an item, but did not complete the purchase. Remarketing helps remind that customer about a recent item he considered purchasing. This feature increases the visibility of your ads, thus increasing the chances of your customers completing a purchase or a subscription.
Do several tests for each ad
Testing your ads help measure their effectiveness. Create several versions for each of your ads by varying the title, the body, or the call-to-action so you could figure out which one works best or which version brings in more clicks and conversions.
Use negative keywords
By using negative keywords, you’d be able to weed out search phrases that are related to your industry, but not to your specific service. For example, if you’re a lawyer specialising in immigration, you don’t want your ads appearing for searches related to “divorce lawyers.” By adding phrases to your list of negative keywords, you will also reduce the costs of your campaign, because you’re not bidding on search phrases that are not specific to your campaign.
Device-specific campaigns
What’s great about PPC is that you can target a specific device where you want your ads to appear. You can choose to target desktop, mobile or tablet users, or target all of them.
Schedule your ads
You can also schedule your ads so that they only appear during specific times. This feature is best used if you know through research when your target customers are mostly online. This increases the visibility of your ads and increases your chances of being contacted.
If you would like to find out more about using Pay-Per-Click for your online marketing campaigns, contact us today.