Lost on how to make search and social media ads work for your business without wasting money? When used well, PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising helps businesses reach a lot of users who would love their products and services — without breaking the bank.
PPC combines a lot of eager eyes with a high potential for optimized spending, since companies only pay when people actually click on their ad. That’s probably why, as Gartner reports, PPC is the largest spending area for CMOs in 2024.
Learn how to optimize your ad budgeting, keyword targeting, and audience segmentation to get to those blue-white fire results.
1. Fire Up Your PPC Program With Clear Goals and KPIs
When you’re looking to improve your PPC campaigns, start by choosing fiery goals for your marketing team to chase. Then, connect each goal to measurable metrics so you’ll know how you’ve succeeded and what works best.
For example, maybe you’re looking to lower expenses so your business gets a better ROI. In that case, you’ll want to bring down CPC (cost-per-click), either by a specific amount or a percentage of the current cost.
Or instead, you’d rather get more eyes on your ads or see more qualified leads make their way to your sales team. Zero in on higher converting keywords and find and fill any related keyword gaps. Bonus! Collaborate with your sales team to find out how many leads they receive from PPC.
2. Get Laser-Focused On the Right Audience
You can create incredible, engaging PPC ads — but they won’t perform if they’re not seen by the right people. Refine your audience segmentation strategies by better targeting the most relevant demographics, interests, and behaviors.
Consider audience strategies, such as:
- Finding geographic areas with the highest conversion rates and increasing your bids in those places
- Running multiple campaigns that each target a specific customer persona or area, with personalized language and offers based on preferences from past data
- Using customer surveys or stored data about leads to find out which channels your prospects enjoy most (such as Facebook versus LinkedIn), then up your PPC ads on those channels
3. Conduct Keyword Research to Capture Clicks
Research isn’t just about choosing quality keywords — it’s about singling out the right keywords that line up perfectly with your budget and objectives. Take a long, hard look at your keywords and how they're working for you in the context of your newly set goals. Then, toss out the lower performing ones, so you can add in new terms or double down on the winners.
When looking for optimized keywords, keep in mind that:
- Long-tail keywords have less competition and allow you to capture niche audiences.
- Negative keywords can help you avoid wasting money on terms that won’t get you leads.
- Competitor keywords can help you identify hot new opportunities and sneak into any gaps in their strategy.
4. Focus Your Fire by Monitoring and Adjusting Bids
Setting and forgetting bids leaves a lot of money on the table. Instead, you should consistently adjust bid strategies based on campaign performance to get the most bang for your buck.
You probably don’t have the time and energy to check ads performance every hour, on the hour. Lucky for you, plenty of automation tools can learn your PPC ads goals and keywords to automatically adjust bids in real time. This is perfect for small businesses that don’t have a dedicated ads team — tech can step in and fill this role at a much lower cost.
When it comes to manual monitoring, focus fiercely on making sure your bids are on point in the most competitive markets. Overbidding often leads to wasting way too much money on a keyword that doesn’t deliver a solid ROI. Meanwhile, underbidding means your ad will never be shown in response to a high-value keyword.
5. Ignite Inspiration for Optimized Ad Copy and Landing Pages
When you focus so hard on the strategy part of the PPC equation, it’s easy to forget that ad and landing page content is just as important. Looking at your current copy, decide if it’s compelling, resonates with the audience, and drives clicks. If not, your ads and landing pages could definitely use a refresh.
While SEO (search engine optimization) principles are technically for organic search, using them in ad copy can ensure your content is actually relevant to the search results or social media feeds on which your ads appear. Including ad keywords and synonyms in natural ways within the written content — and using them to help inform what might be shown in visuals — will create a more linear ad experience for users.
Keeping with the theme of making ad experiences make sense for your prospects, create landing pages that specifically align with ad content that points their way. You may get better conversion rates when people can (1) see an ad that speaks to their specific needs on their preferred channel and (2) follow that ad to a landing page that furthers the same topic.
Also, you can improve your ad and landing page content more strategically by using A/B testing. By creating and using two different versions of an ad at the same time, you can test tiny changes to see which wordings and visuals engage specific groups best.
6. Consider Ad Extensions An Important Tool In Your Arsenal
Ad extensions aren’t just an add-on — they’re an essential. Improve your CTR (click-through rate) and overall ad performance by incorporating extensions, so you take up more space on results pages and give users additional options for action — all without any extra cost.
Your ad extension options include:
- Sitelinks, a clickable link that takes users to a relevant page on your website
- Callouts, an additional line of text that can emphasize key information such as specific product points or discounts
- Reviews, awards, or rankings from third-party sources that provide social proof for your value prop
7. Leverage Retargeting to Rekindle Relationships
Retargeting is an incredible strategy for re-engaging users who previously interacted with your ads or website. In retargeting campaigns, you can set highly relevant ads to show to users who have already exhibited an interest in your company online. This is essentially a lead warming machine that chugs along without any time and effort from your sales team.
Convert more potential leads into customers by making sure your retargeting campaigns use the four M’s (market, message, medium, and measure). Essentially, these ads should:
- Be personalized to the specific ad group
- Speak to where prospects are in their buyer’s journey
- Reach them on their preferred platforms
- Show up at a frequency that keeps their interest
Crackle the First Spark In Your PPC Program
The complicated strategies behind every aspect of PPC ads can keep smaller businesses from competing on the best keywords. If you don’t have time to balance great audience segmentation with deep keyword research, optimized bid setting, and quality content, reach out to the team at Pyromaniac. We’re ready to ignite your PPC program to fuel more leads while saving you money.
