Paid Search Best Practices – How to Optimally Run Ads

The world has gone mad with paid search ads, and rightfully so. It is the basis of most online marketing, and for a reason. Whether done with search engines or social media sites, this paid search strategy can bring you traffic you would never even think of. And, with advanced tools that can help you see your campaign performance, it’s one of the most responsive search ads you can imagine. So, it’s understandable why so many companies use it for their benefit.

In this article, we will focus on optimizing your search engine results advertising, go over the concept of paid search optimization, and help you get to your target audience in different ad groups through paid search advertising. So, if you want to get the word out there and bring some incredible traffic to your website, we have got you covered! Let’s start paid search planning!

What Is PPC?

PPC, or Pay-Per-Click advertising, is one of the most popular ways of promoting your content online. Whether this would mean creating a responsive search ad for your website or promoting your fan page on social media, one thing remains the same – it’s incredibly effective. Studies have shown that traditional media can’t compare with online advertising, as Google and Facebook alone have taken 60% of the digital marketing landscape. Those are just enormous numbers for paid search marketing!

How does PPC Work?

You may be wondering – how does it work in practice? Well, allow us to explain. The basic concept is pretty simple – you take an expanded text ad, and rather than putting it on paper or TV, you display it during your paid search campaign next to the search engine result page or on social media. 

Each keyword or interest ad group can be accessed through bidding. Let’s say you have a store that resells keys for games and software. To promote it with PPC advertising, you must find keywords that people would put into the search bar to see those keys. You can use a few tools to help you with that, like Ahrefs or SEMrush, but you can also do it by just thinking about what people type in. If someone would like to buy a fresh and cheap Diablo IV, they would probably type something like “Diablo IV cheap.” Or “Diablo IV key.”

After choosing your keywords, you bid on how much money you would like to spend on your ad against the competitors on the market. If you put 1 dollar for each conversion from this keyword and your competitor puts 1.1 dollars for the same outcome, their ad would be shown instead of yours. It’s as simple as that.

But you can always find a way of getting it done cheaper and better. So, let’s look at how you can optimize your PPC ads and get yours on the top!

Keywords Evaluation

The best practice is standard practice. So, if you want your keywords to work for you, you should probably check on them occasionally. See how they’re doing; maybe they need some fresh air or are too tired, and you need to let them go. 

Let’s go with a simple example. Setting your campaign for Diablo IV right now is still a good idea. It’s a popular game, and people are still looking for cheap keys online. But, in 2034, putting 1 dollar for every conversion from the “Diablo IV key” keyword is probably not wise.

Go to your Google Analytics account to see if your keywords are being used. Some of them are underutilized; maybe you don’t get good conversions, the target ROAS (return on ad spend) is terrible, and you can find better ROI (return on investment). Plenty of things can go right or wrong with this plan, so be sure to check it out from time to time, as every potential customer may go the other way.

Negative Keywords

Speaking of keywords – why not go negative? If you have never heard about this term, let’s break it down. Relevant keywords are those that people are searching for concerning your product/service. Negative keywords, however, are those that you chose that you would not have liked to be next to. 

For example, if you are reselling digital keys, using “locks” as a negative keyword may be a good idea. Those can be extremely helpful in directing your old and new clients toward your site and getting people interested in your products and services.

Additionally, be sure to not only use the grand keywords like “best game store in the world.” Local keywords are also essential when it comes to targeting the right audiences. You can use some highly relevant keywords to get a higher impression share, better performance, and for half of a budget compared to the grand narratives.

Conversions, Conversions, Conversions

There are many goals you can set for your campaign. Sometimes, it’s something as simple as getting likes on the site. Sometimes, it’s more complicated, and you must make good optimization decisions to complete the campaign. And, sometimes, you may get fixated on one or the other while forgetting why you even put out the ad in the first place.

And that would be – to get more conversions. Let’s face it: you have a business to be profitable, so – make it profitable. Add new keywords, yes, add new features, but make sure that people coming to your website are buying something. It’s the worst thing that can happen – to see people coming to your site and doing absolutely nothing. 

Conversions are the key to seeing if your efforts bring profit. That way, you will be able to know where to optimize it. For example, you can have many clicks on your website and almost zero conversions. Why? Well, maybe your landing page is not optimal, and people don’t know how to buy things. Maybe there are too many distractions for them to find the right product to buy.

Plenty of ways can get you to your desired results, so be sure to find out if you have the conversion rate optimized compared to the CTR (click-through rate).

Special Promotions

Next up, we have the special promotions part of our article, and let us tell you – you can get more traffic with those. It’s essential with remarketing, but we will get into that topic later. So, what are special promotions, and why should you utilize them? 

Well, people are always looking for stuff to buy online. And if you have returning customers, increasing conversions is a great idea by providing them with additional features. Maybe you can create a special discount for members, do some geotargeted promos, and even some sales occasionally?

Those practices can get you to reach different audiences and get more clicks and higher click-through rates. Of course, those are just some strategies you can utilize, as there are many ways to be seen in the digital spaces. For example, if you have an ad copy that can encourage customers to click on it and gain more page views, you should utilize it to your benefit!

Quality Ad Copy

Another big thing to remember is that Google and Facebook reward quality products. And quality ads at the same time. If you want to create an ad that will get people to find your products/services interesting, you must hit customers where it matters most. And do it with style. 

Show them that you care about their needs, create a well-drafted document rather than something quickly put together, take care of all the video extensions and image extensions, find new related keywords, etc. Make sure that your ad copy is of the highest quality! How to do that? 

Well, think about what kind of font will get the most people interested. Add CTA (Call-To-Action) at the end of it, like – Buy Now!, or Like This Page! Even the smallest changes, like different colors or bolded words, can make or break your efforts.

Additionally, try experimenting with different types of ads. From something as simple as banners, through videos, and even some interactive elements. There are plenty of things you can do to optimize your ad copy.

That way, you will get potential customers to check out your page and appear higher in search results. Google and Facebook care not only about making money (although, let’s not forget, it is the driving force in bidding wars), but they also want people to use their services. So, if they started showing irrelevant stuff to the people who use their services, they would quickly go out of business.

Ads vs. Landing Page

Speaking of quality – let’s talk about your landing page. And we know it’s not our job to criticize it, but there are some things that you need to take care of. For starters, be sure that your landing page is easy to navigate. It’s one of the most essential elements when optimizing your PPC campaign efforts. If a customer goes onto your website and does not know how to purchase or find relevant information about a product or service, you fail as a businessman.

The consumer’s journey should be pleasant and full of exciting surprises rather than a sad and frustrating experience where they pray to leave this website as soon as possible. Create something exciting but minimal, don’t overshadow the customer with information, and don’t create some complicated maze of categories – go simple. Go with lovely colors! Don’t make it sad; it’s all about positive experiences! Find a way to optimize your landing page so that people will find it easy to navigate, pleasing to look at, and full of potential!

Landing Page Loading Time

We are adding it as a separate point because it’s that important – don’t make people wait for a website to load. It is the single worst thing that can happen to a company. 

The rule is simple: if your site takes more than 3 seconds to load, people click on something else. Like, right now, they are clicking on something else. You may think – oh, it’s only a few seconds more, but what a view of those high-res images…nope. They are already gone; no one is left, just you and the pictures.

It’s pretty easy to create a website that can load faster; you can simply put in lighter images and less stuff on one page and create sub-domains for something more advanced. And if you want to check the speed of your page loading, you can go to Google’s Pagespeed Insights for more!

Mobile First

Additionally, be mobile-oriented! When it comes to searching stuff online, the Google data is brutal. 74% of users who search for things online are doing it on their mobile. And 93% of them do their shopping through the phone. So, it’s no surprise that companies are doing more and more to adhere to the people spending so much time on their mobile phones. 

So, optimize your landing pages for mobiles, use some ad extensions that can be great for marketing strategy specifically for phones, and just be aware of the mobile users at all times. You have probably already noticed in your everyday work that you are using your mobile phone for more and more things, so it’s only logical that people are starting to utilize it more and more in their everyday work and entertainment as well.

Voice Search!

Believe it or not, the increase in the voice search popularity is astonishing. It’s getting to the point that search terms are changing based on talking patterns rather than text-based search ads. Machine learning, in that case, is something astonishing, and with broad match keywords that we use for our everyday searches with our voice, it can change the view on automated bidding strategies for search and paid social ads.

The number of people using mobile devices with voice search is constantly growing. There are around 1 billion voice searches each month, so, as you can see, it’s a pretty big market to target. If you want to increase brand awareness of your company or get more conversions, consider creating not a single keyword ad group but a few of those, some – especially for voice search. 

You will quickly notice that those longer and question-formed searches will get a lot of traffic if done correctly. People tend to speak longer with voice searches, so rather than – Diablo IV keys, they would ask – where can I get the cheapest Diablo IV keys for Xbox. Voice search queries can be a big part of growth for your business, so don’t overlook it!

Call Conversions

One of the most underestimated aspects of PPC campaigns is the call conversions. As we have mentioned before, people are constantly on their phones. And as we all know but may sometimes forget, phones are also great for, you know, calling people. That’s why generating calls can be a great way of growing your reach and potential. 

If you want to boost sales of your company, you will probably refer the potential customer to your best salesmen. Well, with call conversions, you can optimize your paid search campaigns for that particular angle. Google Ads can even show you how many calls you get in the same performance report. Call conversions are extremely successful, as talking to a real human being is much easier when it comes to convincing people about your product.

Testing!

Additionally, be sure to utilize the A/B testing aspect of PPC marketing, as there are plenty of ways you can get the right keywords in and irrelevant searches out. Most advertising platforms will allow you to create a different PPC ad copy in order to test the keyword performance for target users and improve campaign performance overall. You can even test additional features like ad extensions and changes to the campaign structure in other aspects as well.

Those ad variations are essentially a vote on what works best for your customers and what is a marketing tool that they just don’t want to see. If you want to drive targeted traffic, you need to run multiple campaigns to increase the search volume and hit different interest groups as well. 

Of course, ad relevance is key, so be sure to make your ad formats a quality product that people would actually like to look for on the internet. The worst thing you can do is to gain some insane search impression share with little to no conversions in the whole process. That would only make Google or Facebook earn money on your behalf. And that is not what PPC is all about!

Remarketing

Next, we have the remarketing schemes. This is one of the most important elements to consider in your PPC strategy, and it’s often overlooked. Remarketing is one of the most effective ways of promoting your products and services online. With that tactic, you can get up to 150% more conversions and five times more engagement than with regular efforts. How does it work? Well, it’s basically selling to those already interested. For example, if you go onto a website and would like to buy Diablo IV, you even put it in the cart, but something distracts you, and you go to deal with it but forget about the game in the process – we can bet that you will be seeing Diablo IV ads everywhere you go on the internet. And – you will probably buy, as you were going to do so in the end.

How does it work? Every time you go onto a website, a cookie gets dropped into your browser that follows you everywhere you go. This cookie has information on what you are interested in. After visiting other websites, the ones that are in the partnership program will show you ads related to your browsing history. And that’s pretty much it.

Remarketing results can also be improved upon with some additional strategies besides the bid management. If you want to improve performance and maximize conversions, be sure to create a special offer for people who you are remarketing. Give them a discount. Create a special offer, and show them some accessories they may be interested in. Those tactics can help you in reaching your target audiences and lower the cost-per-click. It’s the smart bidding way that you will not only get to reach your target market but also – improve upon your marketing campaign as a whole.

Paid Search Best Practices – Conclusion

So, those are the paid search best practices for you. Of course, depending on your particular situation, you may find something else interesting or useful. It all depends on how you approach the topic, whether you would like to get more conversions, greater reach, or even better quality of ads. This will all influence what you will be getting in the end from your campaigns. We cannot give you a one-size-fits-all solution, but there are plenty of answers you can look for in this article to optimize your ad performance.

Thanks for stopping by! If you liked this article, be sure to browse through our site; there’s plenty of more where it came from. We are sure that you will find something to your liking. That’s it for today, stay safe, and we will see you in the next one!