4 Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns have become a proven strategy to boost traffic and awareness for virtually any business. With even a modest investment, a local shop could see double their usual traffic with the correct utilization.
Like most advertising campaigns, PPC requires research and strategy. The more knowledge acquired prior to implementation, the more opportunity there is to increase conversions. If you go into it not knowing much, there’s the possibility of losing money, and of missing out on potential new customers.
Check out these four important PPC strategies that you should know about and learn how you can optimize your campaigns for the best results.
Location Bid Adjustments
Bid adjustments enable you to control the frequency of showing your ads based on the location, time and even the manner of customer searches. In other words, it offers a more customized manner of showing your ads, at any given time of day, in any specific location.
You can easily use target locations for bid adjustments. In your Google Ads setup, simply select “Keywords and Targeting”, select “Locations”, choose one or more locations, and enter the desired value in the “Bid Adjustment” editing panel.
Location targeting is yet another useful tool in the optimization arsenal. By adjusting bids according to specific locations, relevance in your business’s respective location has the potential to increase, which can have a major payout.
The function also allows you to go as granular or as broad as you want. Just make sure you optimize correctly. For example, you wouldn’t want to pit locations within your business against each other.
If you choose to decrease the bid by 90 percent, it will reduce to only 10 percent of the bid that was originally placed. Increasing the bid to +1000% will increase the bid by tenfold the original amount.
Target CPA bidding
Target cost-per-acquisition (CPA) is a smart bidding strategy that can be another useful strategy in garnering more conversions. This is done through machine learning that optimizes bids for every auction.
If you select $10 as your target CPA, your CPC bids will adjust to get as many conversions for that amount, on average. Some conversions may cost more than the set amount and some may cost less. Creating a new campaign automatically enables Google Ads to recommend the target CPA, based on historical conversion data.
Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA)
RLSA enables you to customize search ads campaigns, based on previous customers or website visitors. Bids and ads will then be specifically tailored to these visitors, and will be visible when they search on Google and other partner sites.
Have you ever left items in your online shopping cart? Chances are that people shopping on your website probably have to. RLSA enables any business owner to reach out and tap these people on the shoulder again, effectively saying “Hey, remember me?” as they continue to browse Google. There is a membership limit for this, and it is capped at 540 days. For RLSA, you can easily optimize bids for existing keywords, or bid on keywords that you do not normally bid on.
To implement a remarketing list, you can add a snippet of code, called a remarketing tag, which is available from Google Ads. This can be added to every page of a website.
To target visitors, you can also create a custom combination list. A custom combination list allows you to make an advanced list out of existing remarketing lists, in order to reach a more targeted group of people.
If you owned an online school supply store, for example, and wanted to remarket to people who showed interest in both pencils and notebooks online, you could combine both lists. Make sure that the remarketing list meets the minimum number of 1000 cookies, before the tailored search ads can take effect.
Negative Keywords
Negative Keywords are also known as a negative match, which means your ads will not be shown when these keywords are “triggered” through search. Anyone who is searching for keywords included in this criteria will not see your ads. You can add these negative keywords to Search and Display Network Campaigns. As such, you can avoid targeting websites that contain those particular keywords.
By enabling the use of negative keywords, you will be saving money by not displaying ads that don’t relate to a user’s search and will not result in a conversion. Subsequently, your quality score will go up, increasing the likelihood of your ads being shown, while also decreasing your cost-per-click (CPC).
Using these PPC strategies will enhance your digital marketing campaigns and create a more targeted marketing strategy for your website. Each user is unique, therefore the strategies you use to reach different pools of audiences should be too. PPC offers a variety of targeting strategies in order to enhance your current campaigns, and future ones.
To learn more about PPC campaigns and how it can further enhance your business, please visit the Arcalea blog.
