5 Best Tips to Create a 6 Month PPC Plan
Most business activities today take place online. Among the various digital marketing methods, PPC or Pay-Per-Click advertising marks heavy reliance across industries. PPC is a paid search marketing method wherein brands and advertisers get charged when online surfers and visitors click the banner ads.
Today, PPC agency, London and in other parts of the world specialise in augmenting online marketing for businesses and brands. Another method that marks prevalence in digital marketing is SEO. PPC and SEO are often used interchangeably. A fundamental difference between them is that SEO helps drive organic traffic and is free, whereas PPC paid traffic.
Understanding platforms and personas
Before delving into tips for creating prolific PPC plans, there are some things that brands and businesses need to keep in mind. Firstly, there are several online platforms, including social media networks. Each of them has its unique peculiarities. Secondly, the online space is like a quagmire; complex and chaotic. With target audiences scattered across these platforms, brands need to have an idea about the buyer personas. A buyer persona is defined using age, location, interests and hobbies, spending patterns and others. Once you have identified the platforms and buyer personas, the following tips come in handy.
Five Best Tips for brands and businesses to follow
Incorporate negative keywords in the PPC campaign
Most brands and businesses focus on positive keywords; these keywords help transform online impressions into clicks and help elevate the Click-Through Rates or CTR. However, advertisers need to consider negative keywords when contemplating their PPC plans. These are keywords that are to be omitted from the campaigns. Doing so helps brands by prompting them not to place ads on result pages that appear upon typing out the negative keywords.
For instance, if Nike promotes running shoes, keywords such as blue tennis shoes and outdoor footwear would form the gambit of negative keywords. On the other hand, keywords such as running gear and trail running shoes would be positive. The distinction allows advertisers to avoid their campaigns falling prey to audiences looking for related items but not the specific ones the campaign intends to promote. Also, this approach helps drive traffic and increase the visibility of the types of shoes in the SERPs.
Use the Iceberg Effect
A common delusion in the digital marketing world is that paid advertising strategies offer control to businesses and brands. However, this notion is far from reality. Aspects such as keywords versus search terms or display campaigns versus automatic placements are out of the hands of companies. This is where the Iceberg Effect comes into play. The Iceberg Effect is where miscellaneous search terms below the surface get clubbed with the ‘positive’ keywords. This hampers the effectiveness of the PPC campaign. In simple words, this advent leads to an unhealthy search-to-keyword ratio. Also, the higher the discrepancy, the lower will be the CTR, and the higher will be the cost-per-click metric for advertisers.
Brands can gain control and curb this discrepancy with the Single Keyword Ad Groups or SKAGs metric. SKAG is an account structuring strategy that entails creating a focused relationship among the single keyword, the ad, and the landing page. The objective here is to bid good riddance to confusing and complicated ad groups. The SKAGs tactic enables businesses to get super granular through isolating one variable at a time, thereby rendering more control over the whole PPC account.
Compare the conversion and sales rates
Now that the keywords, search terms and account structuring are done, the next step is to find out which keywords and placements are garnering the revenues. The way to find out is to track the campaign components and attribute them to sales. A pertinent question is how to trace such in-depth and perplexing insights? The way to go about this is by using URL parameters, such as ValueTrack parameters provided by Google. The feature allows advertisers to track data automatically within the URLs upon visitor conversion; this can be with the help of UTM codes. They reveal the landing page that got the conversion, visitor location, and the keyword typed. Alternatively, this via the hidden field sales tracking option.
Into the Visitor Intent
A qualitative piece of information, visitor intent seems challenging to understand and track. But not anymore! With the CTA (or Call-To-Action) temperature scale, tracking user and visitor intent is simple and easy. The reality of the matter is not all visitors get converted through the landing page. Some conversions occur through display; such visitors tend to be colder. Others are converted through search parameters and are the warmer visitors. This spectrum of warm and cold mentioned above forms the gambit of the CTA temperature scale. The scale entails four sources – display, video, social and search.
Using micro PPC conversions helps to break down into smaller pieces
Micro PPC conversions allow brands and businesses to delve further into source tracking. For instance, consider a PPC campaign on Facebook. After some time, it registers that visitors are not converting. The impulse is to blame it on the ad or landing page. Ever think there are other aspects to consider? What if the visitors only spend a few seconds on the landing page or site? In such cases, your ad or landing page would be appropriate, but targeting may not. The profound micro-conversions are – time spent on site, scroll depth, form field completion and button clicking.
Final Comments
Most business activities, including advertising today, take place online. Among the various methods, PPC or Pay-Per-Click advertising marks heavy reliance across industries. Often confused with SEO, PPC caters to paid traffic and SEO organic traffic. Before getting into campaigns, brands should understand the different online platforms and buyer persona. When curating a 6-month PPC plan, a few tips that come in handy for advertisers are incorporating negative keywords, using the Iceberg Effect and Comparing the conversion and sales rates. Moving further on, brands should delve into the user intent through macro and micro PPC conversions.
