As the online advertising space has changed in the past few decades, we’ve seen a raft of positive advancements when it comes to the delivery and measurability of paid advertising.
Pay-per-click (PPC) is an extremely reliable and effective way to boost brand awareness by getting your name in front of the customers that are most likely to convert.
PPC is an absolutely crucial element of any effective digital marketing strategy, because it allows even smaller businesses who aren’t yet ready to compete organically to improve their visibility and increase conversions.
What is PPC?
PPC is a digital marketing method where you pay each time a user clicks on an ad that you’ve created.
PPC advertising is available to use on a variety of platforms, such as:
- Search engines such as Google
- Social media like Facebook, TikTok and Instagram
- Website banners
- Videos
- Marketplaces like eBay
Ultimately, whatever platform you choose, your goal as an advertiser is to hone in on the right audience to drive traffic to your website and generate leads and sales.
In this piece, PPC expert Sylwia Lysakowska-Lombari from the marketing agency Quibble explains exactly what you need to do to get started!
Map out your goals
Before diving into your PPC campaign, it’s crucial to understand what you’d actually like to gain from PPC.
Whether you’d like to generate more leads, drive sales, or whatever else it might be, it’s important to define these goals from the outset.
Not only will this help you measure the outcome of the campaign, it will also enable you to optimise and make changes to it over time.
Develop audience personas
If you don’t have a clear picture of the audiences that you’re looking to target, any form of marketing will be little more than a shot in the dark. Audience personas are all the more important with PPC, since you need information like needs, preferences and behavioural patterns to understand how to interact with your audience.
This kind of data will inform everything, from how to write the ad content to choosing the right keywords to fit with what your audiences are looking for.
Selecting your keywords
This won’t apply to all PPC platforms, since some are audience-based, and use various demographic, geographic, psychographic, and behavioural data to create target audiences. Still, most PPC platforms are keyword-based.
Carefully selecting the keywords that your audience personas are likely to use to search for your products and services is absolutely critical to your success.
Tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Semrush, Ahrefs and many others are ideal for finding both relevant and highly targeted keywords for your campaign.
Develop compelling copy
Any ad copy that you create must hit two quality markers as a minimum, which are:
- be persuasive
- effectively communicate how your product or service can solve a problem.
Utilising all the research you’ve completed in the previous three steps, by this point you should have a good understanding of what content your audience wants to see.
Develop & optimise your landing pages
The latest research shows that we judge websites in exactly the same way that we judge people: quickly and harshly.
This means you have just 1/10 of a second to appeal to your audience once they’ve landed on your website.
In principle, this means your landing pages needs to offer:
- A seamless user experience
- Fast load speeds
- Relevant copy which reflects the wording on the ads
- Clear calls to action
Set sensible budgets
Once you’ve put all of this together, you can sit down and determine what budgets are realistic for your business.
Of course, as with most things, the more you put in, the more you’re likely to get out of it. However, this needs to be within the confines of your marketing budgets so you can continually tweak and adjust your budgets depending on performance.
Allow for ample learning time
Although it is true to say that PPC is a faster option than targeting organic traffic, it doesn’t mean that this is an overnight process — far from it, in fact!
To get the best results, you need to build up data and the learning time to allow the platform time to understand the micro and macro conversions it should be focusing on.
Of course, that’s not to say that you can’t analyse performance on the go, but it’s important to allow some time before making any considerable changes to the campaign.
Be proactive but don’t micromanage
When you’re spending daily money on ads it can be tempting to keep making tweaks and updates when you feel that things aren’t quite working. However, it really is important to allow the results of all that work to come to logical conclusions.
In practice, this means regularly checking in on top-level metrics, as mentioned, but only reviewing the specifics such as ad copy or landing page calls to action when you have enough data to make informed decisions.
Finding a balance is the best way to achieve your desired outcomes.
By Sylwia Lysakowska-Lombari
