Top 5 tips to supercharge your PPC campaign performance

When you want to raise brand awareness, you can’t beat pay per click (PPC) advertising. According to Google, it can raise consumer recognition of your brand by a massive 80%. In a nutshell, PPC is the catch-all term for digital advertising where the number of clicks the ad receives defines the amount you pay for the ad.

To help you get the most from your budget by ensuring the people clicking on your ads will convert, here are five things you can do today to supercharge your next PPC campaign.

1. Define your goal

Without a clear measurable goal, you won’t have a clear road map for your campaign. That’s why step number one should be to decide what it is you want your PPC ads to achieve. This could be one of the following goals:

Boost traffic to your site

PPC ads directly link your brand with keywords people are searching for which makes it a quick way to increase traffic to your website.

Drive leads to your site

By looking at the analytics, you can track everyone who arrives on your site via a PPC link as they progress through the sales funnel.

Develop brand awareness

PPC ads let you display your brand alongside keywords associated with your sector, which helps keep your brand name top of mind.

Increase sales

PPC ads let you specifically target people who are already interested in your product or service. So you’re preaching to the (hopefully soon to be) converted.

Why it’s helpful: Defining your goal determines the strategy for the campaign and helps set the objectives against which you can track progress and measure success.

2. Research your keywords

A scattershot approach to PPC advertising is a quick way to blow your budget. The key is to have a targeted approach based on carefully selected keywords that you know are important to your audience. To achieve this:

• Start with a brainstorm session to come up with the words that are most relevant to your brand’s products or services.
• Then, type these keywords into Google to see what popular searches appear in the drop-down list. This will give you invaluable guidance on the most popular phrases related to what you do.
• Use a keyword search tool (such as semrush.com or searchvolume.io) to audit your keywords for performance to ensure you select the ones most likely to add value to your campaign.

Why it’s helpful: It puts you in control. You can create an entire campaign around a keyword and deliver a more relevant message to your target audience.

3. Know your audience

One of the great things about PPC ads is that you can target them based on demographics such as age, gender, income, education level, geographic location, or even relationship status.

This is only a good thing if you truly know your target audience. Get it wrong and you’ll squander your budget on irrelevant keywords. Geographic location, for example, is an increasingly popular search term as people look for local services (e.g. hairdressers near me). Knowing your audience lets you target them directly in your campaigns.

Why it’s helpful: It helps to create a more personalised ad experience and 71% of consumers prefer ads tailored to their shopping habits and interests.

4. Test your ads

“Words are free. It’s how you use them that will cost you,” said Rev J Martin in The Power of Words.

The words you use in your campaign can lead to success or failure. A/B testing lets you analyse two versions of an advert so you can see which one gets the most clicks. This helps take the guesswork out of running a campaign by letting you test not only which words lead to more conversions, but also which colours and calls-to-action encouraged the most clicks.

To help eliminate factors that might skew the outcome, test ad variations simultaneously and one variation (e.g. words, colours, calls-to-action) at a time to distinguish which element is affecting results.

Why it’s helpful: Not only does it maximise your chances of converting your audience, it can help keep campaigns within budget and give you the best return on investment.

5. Optimise for mobile

In 2020, no less than 84% of adults owned a smartphone and spent over two-and-a-half hours online each day. So it’s no surprise that searches on mobiles (50.71%) outnumber those made on desktop (45.53%) and Google prioritises sites that are optimised for mobile.

Consumers expect the mobile experience to replicate the one they get on a desktop. If it takes longer than two seconds for a site to load, they’ll leave. That could be why almost 72% of domains change search rankings by one place on mobile compared to desktop, and 29% change by ten places. So if you don’t already optimise for mobile, now is the time to start.