8 Ways to Improve Paid Search Campaign

Why Paid Search (PPC) Marketing?

Paid search marketing commonly known as Pay per Click (PPC) is the quickest way to see tangible results in online marketing. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising provides excellent opportunity for Business to target, relevant online ads to audiences when they are actively searching for; within a controlled budget, and results are easy to measure. And of course audiences can be targeted in every stages of the buying cycle. This dynamic area of online marketing already worth around £ 3 billion in UK per year and possesses huge potentiality of growth and Google is continuously dominating the search market.

Why Google?

Latest search engines market share report shows that in UK more than 90% searches are done through Google, 5% through Yahoo and 3% through Bing. Hence, there is valid reason to concentrate your optimisation in Google Adwords later Google’s optimised campaigns can be replicated to other search engines easily.


How to Optimised PPC campaign in Google?

1. Find out your target Audience
Unless you sale everything for everyone, you need to focus on your potential audiences. Better understanding of your audiences will enable you to target appropriate message to grab their attention.

2. Identify what you want to achieve from your PPC Campaign
Your need to clearly set out your PPC marketing objective such: brand enforcement by increasing traffic or increasing lead or sales and ROI. With that in mind, start conducting your keyword research and identify those phrases that will help drive the right traffic to your site.

3. Understanding Google Quality Score
Quality Score is a dynamic value assigned by Google on each key word in an Adwords campaign. Google use this mechanism to identify the relevancy and quality of Ads and landing page to key wards. There are various factors which Google takes into consideration to identify the quality score of a particular key phrase such as:
• Click through Rate (CTR) of key phrase
• Historical Adwords account performance
• Historical CTR of display URL
• Relevancy between key words and ad creative
• Quality of landing page
• Landing page load time and others relevant factors

Higher quality score of a keyword will result higher ad position within Google search and content network. Higher quality score also lower the cost per click (CPC).

Start with experimental budget at first covering a number of words and then try and narrow that down. You need to continually analyse the keywords to make sure you’re getting the greatest return. You also need to tailor the wording of your ad to make it relevant to the search word.

4. Campaign structure
It is always good to replicate the structure of the website in to Adwords account such as every single product is grouped into an ad group and every single category grouped into a campaign. Which helps to develop theme based keywords for every single ad group this will increase relevancy among key word ad creative and landing page which will increase CTR, one of the important factors for higher quality score.

5. Ad Creative
You will have only 95 characters long message to convince your audience that you have what they are looking for. So highly targeted and compelling message need to embed in an ad creative to get customers attention. Using the keywords that a customer uses to search for a particular product or service, will naturally grab the customer attention and provoke them to click on the site.

Try to include one benefit and one call to action in the pay per click ad body text and always try at least two version of ad creative and see which one performs better. PPC is all about continually testing, tracking, and refining. If you test - track carefully and test long enough to make data driven decision.


6. Key Words Research/Refine
Using tools such as Google key word tool to get key word ideas, using various reports such as search query performance report and search term report to find out what are the key terms are being used to find your website, if keywords are not related to you website include them into negative keywords list and also taking advantage of match type to control unwanted traffics.

7. Landing page quality
Landing page need to be very targeted and provoking audience to take action by using call to action phrases. Make sure each landing page contains content that will deliver on your ad's message or promise. Use Google web optimiser tool to test different version of landing pages to achieve higher conversion rate.

8. Performance measuring /Testing
PPC is all about continually testing, tracking, and refining this will help to identify successful keywords and successful PPC advertisements. It is always good to identify Key Performance Indicators (KPI) which is very important for your search marketing campaign such Impression, Cost per Click (CPC), Click through Rate (CTR), Quality Score, Conversion, Return on Investment (ROI). The key indicator to look at is your CTR, a primary factor of achieving a high Quality Score and importantly you need to focus on Quality Score which will have impact on ad ranking and cost of search marketing.