PPC (pay per click) is one of the most highly targetted advertising options available. Google AdWords is the most popular, however PPC also covers a range of other online advertising platforms including LinkedIn, Facebook and banner advertising. It can be a very effective form of advertising, although many companies do not make the most of this medium.
Here are our handy tips to make sure you’re getting the best out of your online advertising efforts:
Negative Keywords
A negative keyword is a word or term that you don’t want your ads to show for. For example, if you offered IT servicing in Hampshire, you might not want your adverts to run when someone types ‘IT servicing Leeds’. So you can add the word ‘Leeds’ to your negative keyword list. This has the benefit of removing low quality clicks, but it also helps improve your click through rate (CTR) since your advert will be more targetted.
There are many ways you can come up with a list of negative keywords:
Brainstorm: Start making a list of all the terms you don’t want to show for.
Analytics: Look at the ‘Matched search queries’ report – are there particular search terms that are giving you a high bounce rate. These might be terms that you want to avoid in future.
AdWords: Look at the ‘All search terms’ report, to see what searches have resulted in a click on your ad. There may be searches here that you know instantly are irrelevant.
Landing Pages
You should make sure you’re sending searchers to the most relevant page possible. The best way to do this is to create targetted landing pages for each AdGroup/product/service. Not only will this provide the searcher with what they’re looking for in terms of content, but you can also use this page to help improve conversions. Getting visitors to do what you want them to do with carefully crafted call to actions.
Testing
The Japanese have a philosphy called Kaizan. It stands for continuous improvement. This is something that should be applied to your Google AdWord and other PPC campaigns. You must always work to improve your performance. There’s so many things you should be testing:
- Landing pages
- Adverts
- Keywords
- Phrase/broad/exact match keywords
- Minimum bids
- The time of day you deliver your ads
Testing is a never ending process and will help improve your campaign continually.
Many people assume that they can set up their Google AdWord account and just let it run without any proactive management. Yes you only pay for the clicks you get – but you need to make sure those clicks are high quality clicks. Additionally, the better managed your campaigns, the less you pay for those clicks.
If you need help setting up or managing your Google AdWord campaign, talk to us. We manage campaigns with budgets from £150 a month all the way up to £50,000 a month and love helping our clients get the results they want.