7 Things You Didn’t Know About PPC Ads

7 Things You Didn’t Know About PPC Ads

Maybe you’ve been getting emails from Google offering up some free cash toward your AdWords account. Sounds great, right? They make it sound so easy – drop some money on a few ads for targeted keywords and all the sudden you’re driving in tons of traffic and sales. If only it were so easy.

PPC is more than just picking keywords, locations, and dropping cash. It’s just as nuanced as SEO or any other key marketing strategy; an ever-changing landscape that requires you to pay attention to trends and techniques in order to get the most out of it. We’ll walk through some of the little known aspects of PPC, showing just how powerful it can be.

A/B Testing

So you are getting a 5% conversion rate – congratulations. But what if weI told you, you could possibly get 10%, 20%, or even 30% conversion rate? Optimization is key and making sure you go in the right direct, you need to setup A/B Testing (with AdWords, it’s called experiments). A/B testing will give you two variations with small changes to compare to and see which one is performing better. From there, you can pick the top performing variation and continue optimizing your ads from a better vantage point.

If You Spend More, You Learn Quicker

We get not wanting to spend a ton of money on something you’re just trying out for the first time, but spending is the only way to flourish in PPC and learn how it works.  One month of testing with $3,000 versus three months of testing with $1,000 is vastly different. Having an adequate amount of spend will gain you a faster and even possibly a better result. You’ll have much more data to pull from and real successes to point to as well.

Find your perfect Ad Schedule

Figuring out your ad schedule can be hard as the limitation of AdWords only give you a max of six blocks in a day. With previous data, you can pull the dimensions of when a user is converted and take it to excel to build a pivot table that is turned into a heat map. This will give a great solution on what time and day your ideal audience is converting.

Test Ads for Organic

Organic search traffic should always be an end goal. Having top position on a competitive keyword from a piece of thought leadership that brings a steady recurring amount of traffic is great. But what if you did all this work, took 1-2 years and you saw no conversions from that traffic or no traffic at all when you get to the top position?

AdWords is a faster and quicker method to find the ideal keyword that convert for your website. After a few months, you will start building a target audience and a list of keywords that you could write pieces of thought leadership to hopefully serve the user’s intent and get the sales.

You Need a Message

Beyond just how you’re deploying your ads, you need to think about what they’re saying. As with any marketing effort, you have to have a strategy for the written and graphic content in your ads. People have trained themselves to gloss over ads – make yours pop. Remember who your audience is and what’s going to stand out to them. AdWords gives you a unique opportunity to show up in search results for certain terms, so you better make sure your ad delivers on what they’re looking for.

Remarketing is a Force to Be Reckoned With

Remarketing gives you to coveted opportunity to keep within someone’s range of sight long after they’ve left your website. It’d be like if someone went to your brick and mortar store, thought about buying something but didn’t, and went home and were reminded about that product off and on until eventually they come back to your store and make the purchase. This is more than just another tool in your utility belt – it should be a crucial part of your larger PPC strategy.

Localize to Thrive

The more local your ads are, the better. People want solutions to their problems fast and if they can get that locally, even better. Plus, some services just require you to localize your ads and target certain areas. Why waste money deploying ads to New York when your business is in Issaquah? Keep it focused. The more you can speak to the individual needs of your prospects, the better.

Need some help getting your PPC campaigns running effectively? N2Q’s expert PPC team can come alongside your company and get you real results. Give us a call today.