15 Innovative Tactics to Boost Your PPC Campaigns

Today, PPC advertising has become one of the most efficient and useful tools available in a digital marketer’s arsenal.

When compared to SEO, social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing, and so on, Pay-Per-Click marketing proves to be self-sufficient in its potential, offering almost an instant boost in online traffic as well as conversions.

But you should always bear in mind that Pay-Per-Click is a multidimensional specialty that one can easily get wrong.

So, if you want to run effective PPC campaigns that give the desired results and meet your goals successfully, you must be prepared to innovate your tactics.

In this blog, we will discuss 15 fifteen changes that you should begin working on right away to see great results.

1. Pick the Right Keywords

In order to make your PPC ad work, you need to place a bid on certain matching keywords to your ad. Apart from the other factors, your bid’s effectiveness relies on the amount you are spending, so you might want to ensure that you are placing your bid on the right keywords.

For example, when using Google Ads, Google Keyword Planner is an excellent tool that offers keyword suggestions, lets you research, and select the ideal keyword among the most effective ones. While using this tool is a good start for you, remember that a lot of your competitors might pick the same keywords from there.

The secret to success is identifying phrases or words related to the top keywords and other organic search terms.

If you are able to discover a word/phrase that the Keyword Planner is not suggesting already, then the chances are that you have uncovered a keyword that your competitors are not bidding on.

2. Always Lead With Value

This is a potent strategy that works wonders across every marketing niche, which applies to PPC.

While your keywords’ focus should be partially on the specifications and details of your offering, allow the ad copy to take a value-based approach.

For example, let’s suppose you work for a digital marketing company. Now instead of creating an ad copy that defines your services as “digital marketing services,” explain the benefits and values of your services like “grow your traffic,” “increase your conversions,” and “boost your impressions.”

Don’t just write something that a reader will ‘literally’ get, instead talk about the value that your products and services offer to your customers. How will your product/service fix their problem and improve their lives?

3. Make Sure to Add a CTA

It is highly recommended to wrap up your ad with a call-to-action button. The main body of your ad must demonstrate the value and make it all about the consumer. In simple words, explain to them why they should purchase your product or service. What will they get out of it?

However, you don’t want your viewers to see your ad, get motivated, and be confused about what they should do next? A CTA guides potential customers to take the desired action. Therefore, you need to add a call-to-action that clearly presents the viewers with the next actionable step to take that the rest of the ad has been preparing them for.

Moreover, a good CTA should contain a sense of urgency that makes the prospects think that there is something valuable for them to grab right now.

A compelling call-to-action should have the following features:

• Your CTA should be persuasive.
• It should convey a clear-cut benefit for the consumers.
• The CTA must carry on the conversion momentum.
• It should lead to action.

Even the simplest CTAs such as “sign up now,” “download today,” and “start my free trial today” have proved to be more effective than ads that do not have any call to actions at all.

Popular video streaming site Hulu has an effectively compelling CTA “START YOUR FREE TRIAL” and the text above it “TRY UP TO ONE MONTH FREE” also adds to it.

4. Target Both Newbies and Adepts

If you are aware of the marketing funnel concept, you must also know that you can convert prospects at different funnel stages.

The first stage of the funnel is generating brand awareness and sparking interest. Typically most of the PPC campaigns aim for this. Here the PPC marketers use keywords to target users who might have no idea what your company does.

Although, users in the latter stages of the funnel are very well aware of what businesses like yours offer, and these people tend to have a buying intent already. Use keywords such as “hire a digital marketing team” particularly for prospects in your marketing funnel’s commitment stage.

Once your ad viewer has the buying intent, there are pretty good chances of him/her converting.

5. Should You Place Bids on Brands

Some people in the PPC industry will always suggest you not place bids on branded keywords, and we do find some logic here. For example, you should not place bids on your own brand.

If a person is familiar with your brand, he/she can search for it online and visit your site directly. You don’t have to especially pay for an ad to drive them to your website. Although if you are offering other brands’ products or services, then you can bid on keywords related to it.

Hence, if you are an XYZ bike dealer, don’t place bids on your own company, instead bid on keywords such as “XYZ bikes for sale.” This will help you reach consumers searching for a particular product, but they have numerous supplier options to purchase from online.

6. Use Long-Tail Keywords

A lot of companies and marketers stick with short-tail keywords that are just 2-3 words long, like, “buy XYZ bikes.” This is a great way to ensure you are bidding to the broadest possible audience easily and probably acquiring more ad clicks.

But a long-tail keyword such as “buy XYZ bikes in Toronto” is more descriptive and specific, but it will also get displayed especially to those who will most probably convert. So you might want to put in some time and effort to find long-tail keywords that work best for your brand.

Tip: You can find ideal long-tail keywords by going through organic search results that have led users to your site.

7. Remember ‘Quality Over Quantity’ Always

Most Pay Per Click platforms have their own norms regarding factors that can help you in winning a bid. As mentioned earlier, it’s not all about the amount you are willing to spend on your ad, it’s also about your ad quality. For example, in Google Ads, this is evaluated by a ‘Quality Score.’

Again this doesn’t just consider your CTR rate, but it also sees how relevant your ad is to the selected keywords, and your website is to the ads. Therefore, first of all, increase your quality score by removing any keywords that don’t have any relevance to the specific ad.

8. Focus Your Ad Groups

Relevance plays a huge role when it comes to an ad group acquiring a good quality score. This is why you should make sure that every ad group serves a particular purpose.

For example, if your company offers both SEO as well as social media marketing services, you can feature both of them together in one ad for all-encompassing digital marketing.

But, if you build a separate ad group for SEO keywords and social media marketing keywords as well, the chances are that you will be able to drive more clicks and conversions.

Ad groups tend to work best with an exclusive small target. Targeting too many keywords with a single ad means your copy will be assorted and thus making it difficult for the ad groups to perform well.

9. Cut Clicks That Do Not Convert

You might discover that your PPC ads are showing up to a lot of users that are not even the kind of users you want to market to.

For example, let’s have a look at the bike dealer example again. If you only sell the XYZ brand’s bikes, you wouldn’t want your ads to be displayed to users who are looking for ABC bikes or dealers. In such cases, you can label “ABC” as a negative keyword. Negative keyword modifiers help ensure that your ad does not show up for irrelevant web searches.

However, there are extensive categories of keywords that you might want to block too. For instance, if your offer does not include any free trial or download, you can mark “free” as one of your negative keywords. Then, a lot of people might come looking for job opportunities online in an organization like yours, so unless you are hiring, assigning terms like “employment,” “hiring,” “job opening,” “career” and so on as negative keywords too.

This isn’t something you do at once. Keep adding new terms to your list of negative keywords. This will save you a great deal of money as you won’t be spending on clicks that don’t convert.

10. Be Particular About Who Sees Your Ads

Bear in mind that there are going to be users who will click on your ad without having the intention of buying your products or services or taking any serious action at all.

Moreover, there have been many “click fraud” cases in the past too, where sometimes, companies have clicked numerous times on their competitor’s PPC ads so that they pay more uselessly without getting anything out of it.

This might not seem that big a problem but imagine this happening every day. This would eat up your whole budget and make your PPC campaigns too costly. Therefore, make sure you are using IP Exclusion. It helps pinpoint the IP addresses that keep clicking your PPC ads without taking any action or converting. It will ensure that your ad is not displayed to those users in the future.

11. Build Different Ad Groups for Mobiles

Just like you build responsive content and websites for people using mobile devices, you should also build responsive PPC ads for them alike. For example, if you use social media pay per click, then you get the option to add photos and videos.

Some of these multimedia ads won’t even work well across mobile devices, so the users won’t click them in the first place. You can consider mobile ad bids differently from desktop ads. You can reduce the chances of specific ads showing up on mobile devices or just restrict them from displaying completely. Similarly, you can build ads that appear particularly on mobiles.

12. It’s Time to Get Local

The physical location of a company can heavily influence and appeal to users who are located nearby, too, especially when it comes to search engine PPC like Google Ads.

We have already discussed how including your location in a long-tail keyword ad group can benefit you.

But setting up location parameters for an ad increases the chances of nearby web users seeing it even if they don’t search using the specific location.

In fact, Google itself has uncovered several studies demonstrating how effective location-based marketing is, and yet most businesses don’t consider it.

13. Time Your PPC Ads Right

Just like the location matters, time matters too. As soon as you step into the online business world, you learn that different users behave differently at different times of the day and week.

For instance, a user may be interested in taking a look at your ad on a Monday morning, but they will not have the time to take any action or convert right away. However, they might be willing to spend time as well as money on a weekend afternoon.

A lot of PPC platforms let you set time and day limitations on when your ad will show up. The best way to find the ideal time to run your PPC ad is to allow them to run for a couple of days 24/7, then analyze at what times and days you are receiving the most traffic, clicks, and conversions, then you can narrow down your ad limitations to those time durations.

This will help limit your ads’ inefficient clicks and make sure your ad appears only when the user has the time and energy to take action.

14. Landing Pages Are Just As Important As Your Ad

Don’t even bother putting any time, effort, or money in your ads if they are just navigating the leads to your site’s homepage.

Use separate landing pages for each ad group that offers content and CTAs tailored to your prospects’ particular wants and needs.

For example, if you are selling bikes, it would be best to have individual landing pages for XYZ bikes and ABC bikes.

Also, do conduct A/B testing to ensure the complete effectiveness of your landing pages. Ensure you are using the right images, placing the CTA at the most convenient position, and using the right heading. All these factors can highly influence the visitors to either convert or give up.

15. Match Your Ad Copy to the Landing Page

The visitors should be able to recognize quickly how your landing page is relevant to your ad. The ideal way to ensure that is by matching your landing page’s content and title with the language you have used in your ad copy.

Moreover, you should also try including keywords that led the users to your website and ensure that it fits naturally. Not only will this help the visitors feel they are in the right place, but the relevancy will also help improve your quality score and increase your chances of winning the bids.

Conclusion

Pay Per Click is a domain where the more effort you pour in, the better rewards you will reap. These 15 innovative tactics are the most prominent ones among the hundreds of them to boost your PPC campaigns. So keep them in mind, and you will be all set to run a powerful campaign that meets your goals and delivers the desired results.