Entries Tagged 'Pay Per Click advertising' ↓

At the start of your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign you would have done a lot of research to create powerful PPC adverts, including:

• Research into your audience
• Which keywords to target
• Focusing your advert message
• Devising a strong call to action

But that’s not where the hard work ends, because if you do start to slacken off and don’t regularly review the performance of your adverts you could start to see problems.

Reducing number of impressions or clicks

There could be several reasons for your number of impressions or clicks to be on the decline.

First of all, check out your daily budget; it could be that you’ve reached it. If so, you can either increase it to get more impressions, or reduce your Cost-Per-Click (CPC) for some of your keywords to see how they perform at a lower position.

Secondly, it could be negative keywords causing a problem. These are words that can help you reach the most interested customers by ruling out potential related searches. For example, an Optician selling glasses could use negative keywords such as ‘wine’ to stop people searching for ‘wine glasses’ being shown their ad. But, if you use too many, your ads may not be reaching many people.

Low quality score

Your quality score is a measurement of how relevant your ads, keywords and landing pages are to the person seeing your ad.

If your score is low, or it’s declining it could be due to:

• Your ads not getting enough clicks, so refresh them and consider using negative keywords to limit unrelated searches
• Your landing pages may not be relevant enough to your ads and keywords; it’s always best to have a landing page for each ad group
• Your keywords not being relevant

Average position

Your average position statistic describes how your ad typically ranks against other ads, determining which order ads appear on a page.

If your keyword bids are too low this will result in a low position. Another factor is if your quality score is low, because if Google thinks your ads (keywords and landing pages) are not relevant, it will cost you more to keep a higher position.

CTR dropping (click through rate)

If your click through rate is dropping it’s time to review your ad’s wording. Give it a refresh and make sure it’s highly relevant to your keywords. This would also be a good time to rethink your call to action to make sure you choose something that’s commanding and effective.

Running a PPC campaign is not a one-off deal – you have to constantly monitor your results and refine your ads if you want them to preform for you.

Before we get started, let’s go back to basics.

PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Google ads are found above and to the right of your search results. Written with your keywords and key phrases in mind, they are highly targeted and are only seen by people searching for your product or service.  As the name suggests, you only pay when someone clicks your ad, so they can be quite cost effective (if you know what you’re doing).

So how can you make sure your ads are effective?

Well, here are 7 tips to help you create powerful PPC ads.

1. Know your audience

As with all your marketing, your advert will be targeted at a specific audience. It is important that you make sure your message is written specifically for them. Writing something for everyone will result in a wishy-washy ad that doesn’t attract anyone.

2. Include your keywords

The whole point of PPC is that it’s targeted, so make sure your keywords are included in the heading and body of your ad. Not only will this highlight your ad’s relevance, it will also reassure the potential customer that you are offering what they are looking for.

3. Keyword only headings are a no-no

It may be tempting just to cram all your keywords into your heading, but it will create something ugly and meaningless. Your heading should be benefits driven, offer a hook and contain your keyword. That’s quite a tall order considering you only have 25 characters to play with, so you’ll have to get creative.

4. Be focused

Each ad you write should be focused on one benefit only. You only have 25 characters for your heading and 35 characters for your description, so there’s no room for waffle.

5. Call to action

The best ads will have a call to action. It could be your phone number or a link. Either way it will add value to your ad and give you a way to measure its effectiveness.

6. Proofread

So important and yet frequently forgotten about – proofreading will prevent you from looking like a total amateur and publishing an ad with a blaring typo in it.

7. Test

The only way to make sure your ads are working as hard as possible for you is to test them. Try different headings, calls to action and benefits to see which brings in the highest response rate. Only through this continual process can you find the perfect formula.

Over to you

Do you use PPC advertising?

If so, leave a comment below and leave your top tips for getting the most out of your ad.