How to improve the performance of your PPC campaigns

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising has become one of the most common and popular forms of digital advertising and has proven to be really successful for most businesses. PPC is a great way to increase traffic but it also requires proper planning and constant monitoring to optimise your results. With more and more of our clients requesting PPC campaigns, we’ve put together our five top tips to improve your PPC performance from good to great.

1. Choose the correct platform for your PPC campaign

The first thing to do when planning a PPC campaign is to choose where to run it. Google Ads is most businesses first thought, but did you know that social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter also offer PPC advertisements. Where are your customers most likely to be.

2. Target your audience location carefully

Always target your advert to ensure it reaches the correct people in the correct locations. If you are a local store, you only want your ad to appear locally. If you are a national business, you would want to target the whole country. Although you want as many people as possible to see your ad, targeting is really important as it will impact your results negatively if you continue to serve your ad up to irrelevant prospects.

3. Determine the right type of ad

Each advertising platform will offer different types of ads which you can pay for clicks on. On Google Ads, you can choose between Display, Video, Search and App Ads. For example, Search Ads will show your chosen web address as a search result when someone searches specific terms which are relevant to your business. This can be a great way to increase website traffic and ensure that customers who are looking for your product or service see you on Google, before your competitors. Display Ads are great for raising brand awareness if your target audience aren’t specifically looking for your product or service. Google tracks a user’s behaviour and puts the right ads in front of the right customers.

4. Choose the right keywords

You should begin with your website landing pages that your ads will be linking to and pick out the relevant keywords from the copy. Make sure your keywords include any words containing your brand name any terms related to your products or services. You should also make sure you research your competitors and include in your keywords, the brand names of any businesses offering the same product of service as you. Make sure that you include different variations of search terms. For example, if you are promoting an event in Hampshire, a few variations of search terms you could use are, things to do near me, things to do in Hampshire, fun attractions near me, days out near me and what’s on near me.

5. Track your ad performance regularly and make changes

After two weeks, you should begin to have a clear view of what is working and what is not. Keep track of which keywords are performing best and remove any redundant keywords. If you are using a variety of different ads, you will be able to see which ads are attracting more customers and you decide whether to put more money into the better performing ads or to pause the lesser performing ads. If you notice that your ads are performing better on a certain day or time, you can adjust this and you can also reduce or increase your spend at any point.

At Carswell Gould, we offer a wide range of social media and digital marketing services, you can read more about our services here.