Pay-per-click ads are an extremely effective way to drive traffic and increase your digital footprint, but PPC isn’t always as simple as it seems. Your ad costs can quickly sink your efforts if you’re not careful. Before you start your next PPC campaign, make sure to ask yourselves these questions prior to opening your wallet:
- What Do I Want to Achieve?
You need to ask the most basic question first: what exactly are you running a PPC campaign for in the first place? Are you looking to generate a list of targeted leads? Are you trying to sell something immediately? How are you going to judge the campaign’s overall success or failure?
Making these decisions first is vital because every single decision you make after the fact stems from it. Beyond that, it helps keep you accountable from the very first ad.
- How Much Money Am I Willing to Spend?
Unfortunately, this question is quite difficult to answer prior to starting your campaign, but you should at least figure out what your daily budget is. If you’re spending too much on each individual click, you can try giving different keywords a try or increasing your budget. Especially at the beginning, it’s important to constantly monitor how much you’re spending and what return you’re seeing.
- Where Am I Sending My Clicks?
If you’re simply sending people to your homepage, the PPC campaign could be doomed from the start. You need to send people directly to the specific product page or landing page in order to keep their attention and nudge them in the right direction.
Most importantly, make sure to create a different landing page for each campaign. This allows you to tailor information completely to their specific needs and interests, ensuring you don’t lose any valuable leads once you’ve paid for their click.
- Which Keywords Aren’t Going to Be Worth a Cent?
One of the easiest ways to jack up PPC costs and keep your conversion rates low is by forgetting to set your negative keywords. Negative keywords are the phrases that contain your selected keywords that you don’t want your ads to appear on. For example, if you’re paying for ads for ‘website development’ you might not want to pay for ‘free website development’ or ‘website development class’. By setting these as negative keywords you’ll ensure that your ads are only seen by your target audience and none of your marketing budget is wasted.
- How Will I Communicate With Leads After the Click?
It’s easy to overlook, but post-click communication is one of the most important parts of a PPC campaign. That’s why you need to take a look at a text messaging service. Text messages are opened 97% of the time – almost 5 times more often than the average email is. You can tailor campaigns to specific audiences by using shortcodes, allowing you to target your post-click communications as tightly as your target your actual PPC ads.
Are you running your PPC campaigns successfully? Do you have any questions or concerns? Make sure to let us know in the comment section below!
Author Biography
Joel Lee is the SEO marketing specialist at Trumpia, a text messaging service company, a mobile content delivery service that allows users to customize their one-to-one marketing efforts by interconnecting and optimizing all digital platforms.
