If you’re just starting out with Pay-Per-Click (PPC) online advertising you may be feeling a bit overwhelmed about it all. Nailing a PPC campaign and getting the best ROI out of it is not easy and will require you to continually refine your campaign to perform better. It’s not just a matter of setting up your campaign and then forgetting about it, unfortunately. If you are struggling to get your PPC campaigns to perform well, here are a few tips that you could try to optimize your campaigns.
Set Specific Goals
Don’t just start a PPC campaign because you want to “get some more people to your website.” In order to be able to create a good, focused campaign you need to set specific goals about what you want to achieve. For example, your goal could be to get 200 new targeted leads from your website each week. Then you need to ask yourself how your PPC campaign can help achieve this. What keywords do you need to focus on to achieve this?
Use Long Tail Keywords
Long tail keywords are keyword phrases that consist of at least 3 keywords. They are usually cheaper and often have a better conversion rate. Using the right long tail keywords can improve your campaign’s ROI significantly. If you are trying to sell something (aren’t we all), use mainly commercial long tail keywords such as “buying a motorboat online”.
Don’t Use Broad Match
If you use the broad match setting on your PPC campaign your ads will be shown for keywords related to the ones that you have selected. This can cause your ads to be shown for keywords that aren’t really relevant to your business at all or keywords that you don’t want advertise for because they have no commercial value. In order to avoid wasting money on useless PPC ads, use exact or phrase match only, especially when you are just starting out.
Use Negative Keywords
If you do decide to use broad match, which can actually be helpful for your campaign if you know what you are doing, make sure that you use negative keywords. Negative keywords are keywords that you don’t want your ads to show up for. There are different online tools and negative keyword lists that you can use to discover negative keywords to use.
Create a Great Ad
Your ad copy is very important. You can have a great landing page and target all the right keywords, but if your ad copy sucks, people won’t click on your ad and will never even land on your landing page. Make sure your ad is clear and that you are offering some type of incentive for people to click through. You’ll need to experiment with your ad copy in order to find what works best.
Track Everything
If you know what your campaign goals are, you should know what you need to track in order to achieve your goals. Make sure that you are continually tracking all the data that you need to know about and adapt your campaign based on this data.
Zane Schwarzlose is an SEO at Fahrenheit Marketing, an Austin web design company. Zane is glad he can track the success of his PPC campaigns.