Pay Per Click advertising is an effective marketing strategy which allows businesses to display their ads within search engine results by bidding on one or more keywords. The advertiser or business owner is charged only when a user clicks on the advert and visits the website.
Pay Per Click Advertising can help drive targeted traffic to websites directly from the search engines. A well planned PPC campaign will bring positive ROI and will help drive traffic and users to the website.
How does PPC work?
PPC advertising gives advertisers complete control on the position of their ad on the sponsored results of Search Engines. The position in sponsored results depends on the bid amount the advertiser wishes to pay for every keyword. PPC campaigns are aimed to provide several benefits to the clients. Some of the important benefits are listed below.
Instant Traffic - One of the biggest advantages of PPC is that it brings instant traffic and users to a website. We can set up your ad campaigns depending on your budget and your ads will start appearing in the sponsored results on search engines minutes after setting the campaign.
Complete Control - With PPC, you have complete control over your budget, how much you want to bid for every keyword and what keywords you want to target in your campaign. The best thing is that you only get charged for the clicks which lead to users coming to your website. Moreover, you can discontinue your campaign anytime you want.
Regional Targeting - PPC advertising allows regional targeting to run your campaign. You can control the country, state, city and even zip code or a geographic radius where you want your ads to be displayed, and also control the language in which you want the ads to appear.
Targeted Traffic - The above mentioned features for PPC campaigns help bring targeted traffic and users to a website, as you control the keywords which should be displayed to the user to enable him / her to click on the ad. Similarly, if your business is regional, you can use regional targeting to only drive traffic from a particular region to visit your website.
Common PPC Mistakes to avoid
There are some very important common mistakes that should be avoided when managing a PPC Campaign. These are listed below.
Targeting very general keywords - One of the biggest mistakes which people often do is to target very general keywords instead of targeting long tail, specific keywords. Targeting too broad or general keywords for your PPC campaign can bring in many unwanted clicks which can cost you a lot of money. Single words are usually poorly targeted and are more expensive to bid on. This can exhaust your PPC budget in an instant.
Targeting very few keywords - Another big mistake which people make when managing a PPC campaign is to target very few keywords. This happens because keyword Research is not carried out at the start of the campaign.
Keyword research gives a range of ideas for keywords which can be targeted in the PPC campaign and which are actually searched by users on the search engines. Long tail keywords identified through keyword research can also be used in your campaign, and will cost you much less as compare to other competitive keywords. Long tail keywords are also more likely to attract targeted customers and will cost you much less at the same time.
Bidding a higher price - Another common mistake in managing a PPC campaign is offering a high bid price without considering what is cost effective for the business. This specially happens for very competitive keywords.
Driving traffic to your home page - Most PPC Advertisers only add a link to their home page instead of an inner web page. Driving traffic for different keywords to the same page results in poor conversion as users leave a page if they don’t find information which they came for. Creating landing pages for specific themed keywords and driving traffic to those pages through the PPC campaign can give a much better conversion rate as users would land on a page which had the exact information they were looking for.
Ignoring the landing pages - When managing a PPC Campaign, the landing pages of the website are one of the most important factors which affect the conversion of the visitors. A poor landing page will not convert customers easily. Therefore, it is extremely necessary to have a call to action on the landing pages of the website which are being used for the PPC campaign.
Advertising on Content Network - When you start your PPC campaign, you should turn off ads on content networks, so that your ads are only displayed on the Search Engine when someone queries them. Advertising on other content network sites has a higher chance that your ad ends up being displayed on a page which is not directly related to the exact theme of your website. Displaying your ads on Google Search makes sure that your website gets visitors which are looking for the keywords on which you are bidding.
Not using ad groups - Ad groups allow you to group themed keywords together. With different ad groups, you can use appropriate keywords in the ad and divert users to the specific landing page for those keywords. Using 1 or 2 ads for all the keywords is not a good idea. When you plan your campaign, you should spend some time to research keywords, group related keywords together, identify the landing pages for those keywords and then make an ad unit for those keywords. The same should be done for different kind of keywords for other ad groups.
Not tracking results - Once you set up your PPC campaign, it is essential that you come back and track results on a regular basis. PPC is not about setting and forgetting. You have to monitor your campaign regularly, check to see which ads are converting, which ads can be improved, which keywords convert the best and so on.
Managing your PPC campaign can be a tricky task and can be costly if you are not an expert. We offer Adwords campaign management services to our clients. Contact us today to know more about our PPC services.