The Elements Of A Great PPC Campaign
What are the elements of a great campaign? At Carden Digital, we’ve built and managed PPC campaigns for businesses of all sizes. No matter the campaign, there are some basic that will set your PPC account up for success.
Know The Goal Of Your PPC Campaign
Before building a PPC campaign, you should have a clear idea of what the conversion goal of your campaign is. A conversion is the action that you want a user to take once they’ve clicked on your ad. Some businesses might be looking to make sales directly through their website, others might be using the ad campaign as a way of gathering leads which they will then pass on to their sales team. There are also physical shops looking to use online advertising to drive more footfall to their local store.
Each of these conversion goals would necessitate different approaches to the campaign structure, the ad text, the budgets, the landing pages, and more. Therefore, it is important to have a clear goal in mind before you start building your campaign.
Know Your Competitors
Every business has competitors. Consider whether yours are already using PPC ads. What searches are triggering their ads? Are their ads compelling? What can you learn from the ad copy and headlines they have chosen to use? How could you create better quality ads that were more relevant to your potential customers? If your ad appeared next to your competitors, which one would a user be more likely to click?
Understanding your competitors’ marketing efforts can help you to improve your own. At Carden Digital, before building a PPC ad campaign for our clients, we always consider their competitors and how we can help outperform them.
Know Your Budget
Have a set budget for your campaign ahead of time. Most PPC platforms will let you set a monthly or even daily budget so that you don’t overspend. It is worth considering what the maximum you would spend for a conversion/lead/sale is. This will be your maximum cost per acquisition (known as CPA).
For example, if one sale has a profit margin of £15, you want to make sure that you are spending less than £15 per conversion otherwise you would be losing money on your ad campaign. So, in this example you might set your maximum CPA to £10 to guarantee £5 profit on each sale.
Build Your Keyword List
The keywords are the heart of any PPC campaign. These can range from the very broad (e.g. “women’s shoes), to the hyper-specific (e.g. “women’s purple running trainers size 6 wide fit”). Finding the right balance of general and specific keywords is key to getting your ads in front of the right customers at the right click costs.
At Carden Digital, before building a PPC campaign for our clients, we conduct thorough keyword research, including search volume and click cost forecasts. This helps to find the keywords and phrases that your potential customers are actually searching for.
Write Compelling Ad Copy
Your ad will not be the only one that a user sees. Most Google searches display at least three PPC ads above the organic search results. Therefore, your ad needs to really stand out, with well-written headlines and descriptions that are both enticing to your ideal customers while also being relevant to the keyword which triggered the ad to appear.
Having well-written, well formatted, relevant ad text also increases your ad’s “quality score”, which in turn reduces the cost of each ad click. At Carden Digital, our PPC team includes experienced copywriters who can craft compelling and relevant ad copy for any business.
Build Ad Variations
The more variations of your ads there are to choose from, the easier it is to match the ad copy to the user’s search. Machine learning algorithms constantly cycle expanded text ads and the ad copy within them to find the most successful combinations. As time goes on, the more successful ads are show more often, increasing the chances of users clicking on your ads.
Make Sure The Ads Lead To An Effective Landing Page
Sending a visitor straight to your homepage is not very likely to lead to a conversion. A general homepage is also unlikely to be relevant to a highly specific search term, which will reduce your ads’ “quality score” and lead to you paying a higher price per click.
Building specific landing pages for specific ad groups and keywords gives you the best chance of success. If you do not already have relevant landing pages, Carden Digital’s PPC packages can include the creation of custom landing pages for the campaigns we manage. These help to increase the chance of conversion and lower the cost per click (CPC) of your ads.
Make Sure You Are Tracking Your Ads
Running successful ads is only useful if you can track that success. Tracking tags can help you to know exactly what a user did after clicking on your ad. For instance, you could see if they later made a purchase, signed up for newsletter, called a phone number on your landing page, or just clicked back and left the page immediately.
Setting up ad tracking correctly requires some web design and coding skills. If you don’t feel like this is something you would be able to do, consider speaking to our PPC team which includes web developers who can help to implement and test ad tracking before your campaign goes live.
Monitor And Improve Your Campaign
No campaign will be perfect from day one. Campaigns need to be monitored to ensure that they are running as expected and achieving the results you want. You will also want to review the search terms which have triggered your ads to appear and ensure they are relevant to your business.
As part of our PPC management packages, Carden Digital constantly monitors and improves our clients’ PPC campaigns, as well as preparing detailed monthly reports on the success of their campaigns and suggestions for budgets, bidding strategies and landing page designs. Carden Digital keep you in the loop every step of the way.
Need Help With Your PPC Campaign?
We hope this has been a useful overview of the steps to building and managing a successful PPC campaign. PPC campaigns can be daunting to start but offer some of the best ROI in the digital marketing landscape. For expert PPC campaign management, speak to Carden Digital’s PPC team today.
