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10 P.R.O. tips to help optimise your PPC potential

Oct 1st, 2015

Today’s Knowledge Base takes some things for granted – if you have optimised your page, are producing great content and offering a unique and positive UX, PPC could give you the visibility you need while you wait for your content strategy to pay dividends.

PPC is not going away, whichever side wins the debate as to whether ‘Content is King’, the necessity for search engines to make money means there will always be ad visibility. What is changing is the increasing need for planning, relevance and originality.

This may seem obvious advice, but one of the easiest pit-falls for any PPC campaign is either insufficient knowledge, or insufficiently utilised knowledge of the target demographic. If you are offering experience, or adventure holidays are you targeting search terms in the idiom of your ideal consumer? Use the full range of targeting methods and split keyword into tight themes to increase the relevance of ad text.
Are your ideal customers working 9am to 5pm? Then modify your bids to make the most of evenings and weekends, target relaxation keywords – those terms entered, initially, from desire rather than intent. New parents? Focus on the daytime and child-friendliness. What devices do they use? You can have the finest, most detailed picture of your ideal consumer – but if they’re not seeing your ads, you won’t see the benefit.
Stay ahead of the game when new features are released, there is a short period between release and full adoption in which you can have a real competitive edge, make sure you’re one of the first to board the bandwagon.
Review the search query report (SQR) frequently for both positive and negative keywords – forewarned is forearmed and you will achieve the best results with your campaign when you are the best informed you can be.
Make sure you take advantage of all the ad extensions. Why miss the chance to increase your click-through rate (CTR) at no extra cost? Visibility is one thing, but well optimised, original and relevant copy in these ad-extensions is your sales pitch.
Think global, act local is a much repeated phrase across industries and PPC is no different. Whether or not your company strides purposefully across oceans, if it has any relevance or premises at a local level, then target the local markets – the world is, after all, just the collective noun for a lot of different locals.
Test different ads. Even if, somehow, you hit the nail squarely on the head first time, you should test, then test, then test again – the best results are those you can replicate and the only way to do be able to replicate them is to know exactly what is working and why. Work with three desktop and mobile ads per group to determine which works best.
The more data you have, the better. Results increase in significance the larger the sample size, so make sure you use a variety of date ranges when optimising data to ensure you always have a significant amount to work with.
Shopping campaigns are competitive, but one thing that cannot be neglected in a successful campaign is feed optimisation. Make sure to leave no field unfilled, use recommended title and description lengths, ensure they’re accurate and well written and, above all, make sure you give an easily identifiable (by humans and search engines) description.
Remarketing campaigns currently using ‘whole site’ or ‘whole site minus converters’ can be vastly improved by splitting audience lists according to site behaviour. This allows your ads to better target and to be more relevant to each individual.

For more information, why not try our simple guide to PPC.