Developing a PPC Strategy

What Is a PPC Strategy?

A PPC trategy is a plan for creating and managing paid advertising campaigns across multiple platforms like Google Ads, Bing Ads, and social media. A well-defined strategy helps business increase visibility, traffic, and revenue. With the following optimization, they are able to maximize their ROI by targeting the right audience with the right message.

How to Create an Effective PPC Strategy in 7 Steps

✔️Define Your PPC Goals

It is crucial to establish clear objectives when launching a PPC campaign. The most common PPC goals include web traffic, generating leads, boosting sales and enhancing brand awareness.

✔️Analyze Your Competition

Perform a competitive analysis to understand your opponents in the industry.

• Which target keywords do they bid on?
• What do they communicate?
• What are their unique selling propositions?

Many of the competitors would you phrase search and try to target basically every keyword in the field, so in the beginning, try to focus on your most performing aspects.

💡Use the best and the most unique selling propositions you have, do not communicate vague benefits of your business.

✔️Perform Keyword Research

Keyword research is a must-have when creating a successful PPC strategy. You can use free tools like Google Keyword Planner or paid ones like SEMrush or Ahrefs. The main difference is the approach and the amount of data you will be provided with.

In the beginning, Google Keyword Planner will give you a good insight on what you are going to advertise for.

Focus on high-intent keywords and add some long-tail keywords for more niche targeting. This will give you a good mix of performance in the beginning.

On the other hand, negative keywords will help you exclude irrelevant traffic.

✔️Create Your Ads

Your ad copy should be simple, compelling and the most relevant as it could be.

Follow best practices such as:

• strong call to action
• highlight your unique selling propositions (free shipping, stock available, …)
• align ad message with the landing page

It is very important to communicate the same thing on the landing page as it is in the ad, so a person would not be confused right in the beginning. Add all of the extensions possible, if you are able to show the prices, operating hours, stock avaiable, etc.

Set Up Audience Targeting

From the very basic search campaign to advanced performance max it is very important to define your audience.

You can start with a basic segment using:

• demographics (age/gender/household income)
• geographic (local, national, global)
• online behavior (interactions, interests)

This will give you a good start to work with your own data such as retargeting, add-to-carts, purchases, and reactivation.

✔️Choose Your Bidding Strategy

Your PPC bidding strategy impacts your ad performance, ad placement and ad cost.

From the very beginning start with the manual CPC, where you have full control over bids. This will give you a immediate feedback on the cost of the market where you operate. You can adjust the bids to move your ad higher to be more visible or lower to reduce the cost.

After you get back some data and potentially conversions, you qualify to change the manual CPC to the enhanced CPC or to the target CPA or target ROAS, where Google will help you adjust your prices based on the conversions.

This seems like a lifehack, but be very careful, as Google will more likely to spend your whole budget, if the system lacks of data and conversions. This strategy is more used above certain number of conversions.

✔️Track, Adjust, and Modify Your PPC Campaign

With a good PPC strategy you also need to monitor very basic data such as:

• click-through rate
• enhanced conversions
• cost per click
• potentially return on ad spend

These are the very basic metrics to start in the PPC world and to optimize and improve performance on your ads in general. If your strategy gives you a good amount of conversions at a reasonable cost, you can increase your budget to see, if you will get significantly more conversions or only the ad spend will go up.

❗Keep in mind, that Google will try to deliver the most impressions and clicks possible even if it means, that you will get more conversions or even more expensive conversions.

Best Practices for High-Performing PPC Ads

A reputable fashion retailer started with the search ads and put a lot of effort in the negative keywords. After certain amount of time found out, that the traffic and conversions are generated by just 2 main keywords, which he needs to be on the top 1 position most of the time.

This with a combination of the shopping ads and display ads for retargeting, brings a solid performance in the 4 countries, and the behavior of the customers in every country is very similar. This allows them to expand his business to another country using the same strategy.

Conclusion

An effective PPC strategy requires clear goals, detailed keyword research, a decent amount of budget, audience segmentation, and strategic bidding.

Continuous optimization is a key to success, there are only a few of that are operating above the expectations from the very beginning.

Frequently Asked Question

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