In this article, I want to offer you practical advice on making the most of your PPC campaigns this year and beyond. Our top digital marketing minds have compiled a list of PPC tips guaranteed to get your ads firing on all cylinders, from seller ratings to ad extensions!
1. Campaign and Ad Group segmentation
Properly organizing your Google Ads account into appropriate campaigns and ad groups ensures that you’re serving the suitable ads to the right customers and getting better visibility on the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Set up separate campaigns for each category of product or service you offer. If you’re unsure where to start, use your website as a guide. Segment your ad groups by matching them to categories or product pages from your site. Ensure you include at least one relevant keyword in your ad copy to help guide prospects toward your ads.
Create a minimum of three ads per ad group. Make full use of Google’s ‘optimized ad rotation’ service, which analyses keywords, location, and search terms to enhance your ads for maximized click-throughs in each auction.
2. Minimum requirements for Seller Ratings
Google introduced seller ratings as an automated extension to its Ad platform to help people searching on Google find businesses that offer a high-quality service more efficiently.
Seller ratings appear besides paid listings and display your Google star rating, the number of reviews you’ve collected, and a qualifying statement describing why your business has received such a score.
Including seller ratings in your ads is a quick way to improve your ad performance.
There is no guarantee, however, that Google will display seller ratings.
There is a strict set of minimum requirements your business needs to meet to get the chance to benefit from the service.
- An existing Google Ads campaign
- Collecting reviews through a source trusted by Google
- Your business collected a minimum of 100 unique reviews in the past 12 months
- An overall star rating of 3.5 or higher
3. Create audience lists for everything
The more audience lists you can create, the better your remarketing becomes. Having well-defined lists lets you focus your remarketing on specific customer types based on their interaction with your site.
By understanding and arranging your audience lists around your customer’s onsite journey, you’ll be able to serve more relevant ads to prospects targeted at pushing them toward making a purchase.
You can now tag and set audience lists based on your website visitors’ actions.
So, whether they only browsed your site for a few seconds or abandoned their purchase in the basket, you can tailor more effective remarketing ads that accurately reflect their situation.
Set yourself up with Google Ads Tag Manager and let Google do the listed building for you! This free extension automates the list-building process by collecting visitor data and sorting them into relevant lists based on user behavior.
4. Make full use of all ad extensions
The more engaging your ad content, the greater your visibility and prominence at the top of the search results page. So, anything you can do to enhance the quality and relevance of your text ads, the better!
Ad extensions are a free service that lets you expand your ads in various ways to help you achieve your specific PPC goals. So, whether trying to drive customers to visit your store or increase customer conversions through your website, adding extensions to your ads helps make them stand out from the crowd and increases your click-through rate.
Just adding an extension doesn’t guarantee that it will appear in your ad. Like seller ratings, it’s at Google’s discretion whether to display them, and there are specific criteria you must meet.
They are more likely to appear if:
- The extension will improve ad performance
- Your ad rank is above Google’s minimum quality score threshold.
Top 3 ad extensions:
- Countdowns – Creating a sense of urgency piques interest and encourages customers into action. Adding a countdown to your advert makes the time left on a specific deal appear prominently alongside your ad, forcing customers to click to get the best price on a product before it’s gone for good.
- Callouts – The callout ads extension allows you to bullet point USPs such as ‘Free Delivery’ or ‘Next Day Delivery. You can also use callouts for highlighting offers such as ‘60% Off’ to make your advert stand out with sale-savvy shoppers.
- Promotions – The promotion ad extension allows you to apply a special offer to your advert. You can also add promotional details such as ‘orders over’ or promotional codes. Promotion extensions will appear below the description as a separate callout.
Further reading: How To Use PPC Ad extensions to improve your sales
5. Use of correct keyword match types
You’ve put hours into refining your targeted keywords. But when you set up your first PPC campaign, these automatically get filled under something called Broad Match, which means they aren’t working as hard for you as they could be!
Broad Match takes a catch-all approach, allowing you to reach a wide audience and increase your clicks quickly. However, the issue is that much traffic it generates is likely irrelevant to your business.
To combat this, consider refining your keyword matches to narrow down the types of queries that cause your adverts to appear. Functions such as broad match modifier give you the expansive reach of Broad Match but let you lock in key phrases that must appear alongside your keyword to generate your ad.
Phrase match takes this one step further. Working best with two-word keyword phrases ensures that ads are only generated if the exact wording of the words is included in the search. However, phrase match comes into its own. It gives flexibility to your search terms by generating ads for prospects who search with relevant qualifying statements on either side of your keyword phrase.
Wrapping It Up the PPC Tips!
Using these PPC tips in your marketing campaigns, you can optimize your reach on the web and meet the right customers to boost your lead generation and conversions.
Relevant case studies of Todays.Agency
- A small change to the website increased the conversion rate by 133%
- How to Make Your Brand Work Online: 138.22% More Ttrafficafter the Offline Identity Was Declined through a Clever Online Campaign
- How do you increase sales with Google Ads for integrated playground equipment
Keep in mind that PPC advertising is not a set-and-forget type of advertising. You must continuously test, change and optimize your campaigns to stay competitive and make the most of your advertising budget.
So, which one of these PPC tips do you find the most effective?
Did we miss any of the PPC practices that you prefer?
Let us know in the comments below.