Also known as PPC (pay-per-click) advertising, paid advertising offers an often-economical way for businesses to drive more traffic to their websites, boost their brand awareness among consumers and develop higher-quality leads — all while maintaining total control of their advertising budget, target audience and ad placement. Further adding to its appeal, the powerful tactic frequently manages to accomplish all of these key objectives while delivering brand messaging to consumers just when they’re seeking out or otherwise showing interest in either the brand itself, or products and services related to the brand’s specific offerings.
Obviously, all of these benefits of paid advertising help to make it a highly effective way for any business to make the most of its advertising budget and move the needle for its brand. But even with good things like this, there’s always room for improvement.
To achieve an even higher ROI from your brand’s next paid advertising campaign, try implementing these seven tried-and-true tips from the PPC experts at The Brandon Agency:
1. Target more specific locations with geo-targeting
By employing geo-targeting (aka local PPC) with their Google Ads, advertisers can more specifically hone their ad’s reach in on the specific geographic locations — such as those within and near their specific service areas — that are most likely to deliver higher conversion rates and increased ROI levels. Further, this tactic can help brands achieve lower costs per click when areas with higher ad costs are avoided. And in addition, it can allow for the use of hyper-localized keywords and terms that only local residents are likely to use, potentially delivering higher engagement levels and lower keyword costs.
2. Carefully review keyword effectiveness
By regularly reviewing your PPC ads’ keyword performance reports, you can effectively weed out or pause your ads’ low-performing keywords (those with low to no impressions, few clicks and no conversions) and put more focus on your higher-performing keywords that deliver more views, clicks and sales. This can help your brand reduce its wasted ad spend and invest more in keywords that actually convert — boosting the ROI of your campaigns.
3. … and employ negative keywords
Another way to reduce ineffective ad spend is to determine any search terms that may be delivering clicks — and added costs — to your PPC campaigns when the search queries are irrelevant to your brand’s offerings. For example, a business that sells strictly new computers and hardware could avoid wasting its ad spend on searches for “used computers” and “computer repairs” by adding “used” and “repairs” to its negative keyword list. In addition to reducing or eliminating the costs of ad clicks that are unlikely to bring your brand any business, you can also increase your PPC campaigns’ quality scores, click-through rates and conversions by implementing negative keywords.
4. Prioritize your most important campaign KPIs
Depending on the overarching goal of any specific PPC campaign — and the intended audience’s position in the marketing funnel — certain KPIs will be more important than others for your brand and its marketing strategy. For example, for a brand awareness ad, high click-through rates may be a top objective, while a conversion ad will, of course, prioritize completed conversions and sales. Before launching any PPC campaign, determine what your specific goal for the campaign is, and use that information to decide which KPIs are most important to the specific campaign. Each ad type can be considered a success if it effectively moves consumers through the marketing funnel.
5. Create compelling ad copy
Since, in many cases, your brand’s PPC ad copy will serve as potential customers’ first (and possibly only) impression of your business, it’s critical to ensure that your copy — including both headlines and body copy — is as compelling and engaging as possible. One tried-and-true way to increase the appeal of your PPC ad copy is to craft headlines that grab readers’ attention. Others are to ensure that your ads’ body copy is relevant to your offerings and concise/quick to get to the point, and to create powerful CTAs that urge consumers to take a specific (and strategic) desired action.
6. … and customized landing pages
Many PPC ad campaigns tend to send consumers directly to the advertising brand’s homepage. And in some cases — especially with brand awareness campaigns — this may be a fitting campaign goal. But by crafting ad-specific landing pages that complement and build upon your specific campaign keywords and PPC ad copy, your brand can take consumers to pages that speak specifically to their search intent. That can greatly increase your relevance to these consumers, up your chances of achieving these prospects’ marketing-funnel advancement and, ultimately, raise your odds for customer conversion.
7. Up your mobile site speed
In today’s on-the-go digital world, more and more consumers are using mobile devices for their online searches and other internet surfing. And according to Google research, more than half of mobile-device users will leave websites that take longer than three seconds to load. This makes it critical for brand websites and landing pages to be not only mobile-friendly, but to achieve speedy load times on mobile devices. Because even if a PPC campaign is successful in delivering clicks, all that ad spend will have gone to waste if the potential customer abandons the brand’s site as a result of annoyingly slow load times.
Ready to ramp up the effectiveness — and the ROI — of your brand’s paid advertising efforts? At The Brandon Agency, our data-driven experts know how to get the most out of every dollar spent on PPC advertising, and we’re ready to share our skills to help you boost your business. To put our team of pros to work for your brand, contact us today.
Nick McNeill
Interactive Director
Nick uses his talents in computer science and graphic design to grow the online presence of brands such as Santee Cooper, Southern Tide, frogg toggs, Farmers Telephone Cooperative and Blue Force Gear. A serial marathon runner, his steely determination shines through every brand he grows. As lead user interface designer of the GuestDesk software suite for online hotel reservations, he watched it explode from $1 million in reservations to over $400 million annually.