Tips to Successful Paid Search Advertising

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1 Tips to Successful Paid Search Advertising Get your PPC marketing campaign off to a great start with these valuable tips. Whitepaper by:

2 2 Targeted ad placements that reach your audience PPC can be used to give targeted placements in both search engine results and on specific websites through Display Advertising. A wide range of PPC ad networks allow advertisers to choose keywords and ad placements in order to reach their target audience. With optimization, the possibilities are endless Most PPC ad platforms, including Google Adwords and Bing Advertising, allow marketers to easily test dozens of attributes relating to their ads including copy, calls to action, geographic area, and time of day (and those are just the basics).

3 3 Select the right keywords or ad placements to effectively target your demographic. Allocate your budget to match goals & get the best ROI. Select the right geography for a campaign. Discover which days of the week perform the best/worst. Figure out which hours of the day perform best/worst. Prioritize and choosing what data to look at. Decide what steps should be taken based on your findings. An effective PPC marketer should be able to interpret various data sets and make conclusions based off of that data.

4 1) Use your site structure as a guide Establish unique campaigns based upon the service pages or product pages of your website. This will allow you to send targeted ad copy that corresponds to the service or product you are marketing. This structure will also allow you to allocate varying budgets to different services that you wish to advertise more heavily. TIP: Even if your site structure includes multiple products or services on a single page, it is still helpful to create separate campaigns for each service that each drive traffic to your single landing page. This will allow you to analyze performance of each service and adjust your budget accordingly. 2) Account for geographic targeting PPC ad platforms, including Google Adwords and Bing Advertising, allow markets to easily adjust their geographic targeting. Try segmenting your campaigns for different geographic areas in order to evaluate performance of different locations and deliver more relevant ads.

5 5 Establish separate campaigns for desktop & mobile device users Since websites, and their subsequent landing pages all function differently on device to device, it is important to take this into account when creating a paid search campaign. Click through rates, keyword length & bids are all going to vary from device to device because of how search engines display ads on various devices. Separate campaigns by Network It is important to always separate your campaigns by whether they are targeting your advertising network s Search or Display networks. Not segmenting by this basic campaign setting can have large negative impacts on performance. Search Display

6 WRITING EFFECTIVE AD COPY 6 Ad copy is used to capture the attention and interest of users on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) and set your ad apart from the rest. Keep the ad simple and enticing in order to remain effective. Judging the effectiveness of an ad is done by using an ad s click through rate and Conversion Rate, but it takes time to test an ad and gather enough data to start making changes. Separate relevant groupings of keywords into ad groups This allows you to prepare targeted ad copy for the most specific users possible and increase both the quality score and the click through rates of your ads. Your ads will be built around the keywords in the corresponding ad group. Use Keywords from the ad group within the ad text This is important because the keywords used in the search query will appear in your ad with bold styling. A common method is to use the keyword in the headline because it will be the most visible when it is bolded and users will be most likely to notice the bolded keywords in the headline. Your Ad using Keyword Keyword Keyword Keyword

7 7 Include your Unique Selling Proposition(USP) Every business has a unique, particular selling point that differentiates their business from their competitors. This USP should be used as much as possible in ads to help your brand stick out to the user and have an edge over the competition. Use compelling calls to action Always make it easy for users to identify what they should do next by using a call to action. A call to action will also increase the quality of your clicks since it will reflect users intentions. Example: A unique selling proposition for a home builder would be that their homes are 45% more energy efficient than the average home. Include prices and promotions Any prices, promotions, special off, or discounts should be included in the ads to make the ads more enticing to click on. This projects a sense of urgency or increased value to the user because they want to take part in the special before it ends. Expiration dates are also effective in increasing click through rates.

8 ON-GOING MANAGEMENT & OPTIMIZATION 8 Setting up a PPC campaigns is half the battle. The other half is optimizing the campaign to reach an optimal level of performance. PPC campaigns should be constantly monitored as the market is constantly fluctuating. It is very rare that a PPC campaign will not need to be optimized on a regular basis because there are always various ways of improving a PPC campaign. Monitor your segmented campaigns Take the time to review each of your segmented campaigns to assess varying performance of different geographic areas, different desktop and mobile devices, and the different search and display networks. Use this information to improve areas in which performance is lacking and to increase your budget in areas that yield a strong return on investment. Add negative keywords List of Keywords: blue widgets dark widgets cheap widgets red widgets best widgets free widgets widgets for free Review a complete list of search terms and queries that lead to ad impressions and clicks. From this list, add irrelevant keywords that slipped into your campaign as negative keywords to remove them from targeting. Also be sure to add terms, which are wasting your budget as negative keywords. Keywords that waste your budget are ones that yield a high volume of clicks but a low volume of sales or conversions.

9 Review Time of Day and Day of Week performance By concluding which time of day and days of the week your campaigns yield the most conversions, you can implement day parting to your campaign. Day parting allows you remove ad spend from certain times which do not yield conversions and shift that budget to times that do. Make sure you re properly tracking your paid-search visitors! Sync your Adwords and Analytics accounts (if using Google)! Implement URL tagging on your destination URLs This tool helps: Create and review A/B tests Unless your number of conversions, clicks, and impressions all equal one another, there is still progress to be made! As a result, it is best practice to always be running A/B tests to improve campaign performance. Some ideas for testing include: Ad copy Display URLs Destination URLs / Landing Pages Time of day & day of week dayparting Keyword match types many more! support.google.com/analytics/ answer/ ?hl=en! Double check conversion tracking has been enabled!! Enable call tracking. Calls are! an extremely important success metric of a PPC campaign and can be easily monitored.

10 10 Speak with a PPC Specialist at MediaTrumpet. Call: And for more on PPC trends and other marketing guides, Visit: