5 PPC Ad Optimization Tips
Optimizing your PPC ads is quite important if you want to get the best out of them. Here, I’ll talk about the five best strategies to optimize a PPC ad you can apply to get maximum CTR (clickthrough rates) in minimal time.
PPC (pay-per-click) is a digital form of advertising that allows marketers to post ads on various advertising platforms and pay the host platform whenever their posted ads get clicks. It is considered to be a fantastic model of advertisement that can help you retain maximum visitors to your brand in a jiffy.
Let’s kick off with the top five PPC ad optimization tips.
1. Get to Know Your Keywords Well
Keywords are vital to your PPC marketing campaign health. They are responsible for driving traffic to your ad post from search engines. It is essential you choose keywords wisely to get the optimal results.
When I say ‘optimal results’, I’m referring to the keywords that can bring you the maximum clicks in minimal time.
How to do that?
First, keep the keyword intent (KI) in mind. KI is certainly the most important thing when it comes to conducting keyword research. They share a deep relationship with your product and services. Your keyword intent should match your visitors’ needs. However, such keywords won’t be easy to target as their difficulty rate would be high to compete at times.
By analysing the right keyword intent, you can optimize your PPC ad campaign.
For example, a common keyword for a garment store could be, ‘garment store’ or ‘garment store management, which has a very high keyword difficulty and lacks the intention as well. In that case, it won’t help in the long run.
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It is likely that you might be using a keyword you think is ideal for your PPC campaign, but in reality, it’s not.
What to do then?
The second best way to take your PPC ad even further is the balanced usage of keywords that have a higher keyword volume and lower keyword difficulty at the same time.
Often keywords go through drastic changes. They might get outdated or tend to perform slower than the expectations. In that scenario, conducting thorough research and adopting the new ones would advance the overall progress of your marketing campaign.
You may try SEMrush, Keyword Tool or Google Keyword Planner, to get the up-to-date list of keywords.
2. Evaluate your Landing Page Performance
One good thing about the Internet is that it can take us anywhere in the world within one or two seconds, which is awesome as no one has that much time to wait around. Visitors prefer the same as well. All websites that load quickly have not only experienced lower bounce rates but also have gained regular visitors.
Now let’s understand this one in layman's terms using an example.
Suppose you offer software services and you post an ad that interests a visitor. He clicks on it and lands on your website to gather more information about it. Somehow the website is taking a significant amount of time to load or display the content.
In that case, it is highly likely that the visitor might leave your website and you lose the opportunity to turn a prospect into a customer for good. Eventually, this practice would result in lower bounce rates.
Points to remember while optimizing landing page performance:
Get rid of elements that do not contribute to your landing page performance. It could be third-party ad banners or plugins.
Keep your CTA to the point: You don’t need to recite a story. Simply put it straight without having to stress out your visitors. Two to four words are enough for that.
Make your offer persuasive: Think about how you can make a visitor feel positive and excited. In short, consider your visitor’s end goal and turn that into making a statement/headline.
Capitalize on FOMO: Fear of missing out aka FOMO, compels your visitors to act right at the moment because they begin to feel that they would miss out if they wait. That’s why ‘limited edition’, ‘24 hours left’, ‘2 left only’ are quite common scarcity phrases in marketing.
It is necessary to evaluate your landing performance from time to time. GTmetrix, Google Pagespeed Insights and NinjaSEM are some popular tools you can use.
3. Identify the Negative Keywords
Since you already know, keywords are fundamental to your PPC ad optimization, it is time to learn about negative keywords.
Negative keywords — if carefully selected — redirect the traffic from your ad and minimise the cost you spend on PPC marketing. They can help you to win the best potential consumers/clients, save a lot of your investment and attract more loyal visitors to your site.
Let me simplify it for you by giving you an example.
Suppose you own an online garment store and keep all sorts of clothing varieties for men, women and kids. You have chosen keywords to go with: ‘best clothes for men’, ‘beautiful dresses’, ‘kidswear at cheap prices’ and so forth. Now you think of including negative keywords such as, ‘rent garments online’, ‘garment rack online’ or ‘online courses for garment industry’, and so on in your PPC ads.
What do you think will happen now?
As soon as a user triggers one of the aforementioned negative keywords, Google would not rank your ad because you’ve excluded such keywords from your PPC ads. As a result, the user who was looking to renting a garment store has not been exposed to your PPC ad. Thus, better ROI, good exposure only to relevant searches and a meaningful customer base.
Negative keywords are more than meets the eyes and are capable of boosting the growth of your business if thoroughly researched.
4. Content is King
“Content is King”. It may sound cliché but it’s true. In marketing and advertising, words hold the power enough to catapult an entire business from scratch. Ad copies are written to convert your potential customers into leads. It is vital for the growth of your business, thus, having a well-written piece of content on your PPC ads is something you should not avoid at all.
Whenever a PPC ad shows up, it grabs the attention of the user, on which the user clicks afterwards. Soon, the user redirects to your site in order to enquire about the product or the services you offer. Here comes the worth of ‘content’ into the picture.
Parameters to follow while writing ad copies:
- Understand your target market needs.
- Be specific: Don’t tell in 200 words what could be told in 100 words and vice versa.
- Use keywords, especially in the title. Add two to three times in your overall PPC ad.
- Google Ads allows you to write headlines in 30 characters and two descriptions in 90 characters. Make the best use of them. If you come up with extra information, include them all.
- Incorporate your USP in your ads.
A content’s uniqueness, creativity and tone of persuasion would determine whether the user is going to make a purchase or not. It is also possible that the user is not willing to buy anything at the moment, but a good piece of content surely would leave a good impression upon him. And who knows he might come back to buy someday.
Content is indeed a decisive factor in PPC ad marketing, and one of the best ways to improve your sales is to hire a professional copywriter or content writer for it.
5. Make Sure your Website is HTTPS Enabled
A well-designed theme, beautifully posted pictures and carefully crafted content are not good enough for a website these days. It should also be secure, privacy-protected and free of data theft.
To this end, you need to upgrade the protection by opting for ‘HTTPS’ instead of ‘HTTP’. Why? Because search engines as well as tech-savvy users avoid sites that don't use the HTTPS protocol, especially when a site asks for user details. So there is no use of your PPC ad if you are not able to retain visitors.
Many of you might be familiar with ‘HTTPS’, but let me explain it to those who haven’t heard of it.
It is an encryption protocol that encrypts your Internet traffic and also verifies your server identity. In other words, it assures your visitors that the website they are browsing through is completely legitimate, genuine and secure.
Migrating from HTTP to HTTPS can boost your overall PPC marketing and pagerank.
Final Words
PPC ads can bring you results in a short time if it’s done right. Optimizing PPC ads is an arduous process, but if you could dedicate two or three hours in a week, you will notice a remarkable surge in your campaigns, and ultimately in revenue.
Here, I have mentioned the top 5 PPC ad optimization techniques. By sticking to the aforementioned tips you can do great in the world of digital marketing. While you test them all, there is one thing you need to remember, promoting your brand or business digitally is all about retesting and relaunching. So if these strategies don’t work out for you, try reviewing your ad designs or maybe conduct A/B testing.