PPC (pay per click) campaigns can drive traffic to your website and generate leads. However, that’s not a guarantee; it all depends on the elements and setup of the campaign. PPC can be a very competitive aspect of digital marketing. Still, it can pay huge dividends when you leverage PPC campaign best practices.

Let’s look at some key ones to consider.

Use the “Right” Keywords

The most fundamental PPC advertising best practice is getting the keywords right. So, what does “right” mean? It defines keywords that:

• Are relevant to your industry and phrases that your customers would use with a search engine.
• Are contextually accurate; some phrases or words can seem interchangeable, but they aren’t. For example, medical databases and physician databases aren’t the same. The former describes tools clinicians use for diagnosis. The latter relates to directories for consumers to find physicians.
• Have a decent amount of volume. Appearing in search ads for keywords with minimal volume translates to very little traffic.
• Are moderately competitive. If possible, don’t waste time and budget on the most challenging keywords in terms of competition. In some cases, this is unavoidable, but try to focus on those that won’t decimate your budget in one day.

Additionally, in keyword setup, you can’t forget the negative keywords you want to exclude, like “cheap” or “free.” Another example would be companies that only do residential work, so they’d not want to appear for search queries with “commercial.”

Create High-Quality Ad Content

Google grades your campaigns with a Quality Score, and it’s important. Quality Scores influence the cost and effectiveness of PPC campaigns. The Quality Score depends on several factors, including:

• CTR (click-through-rate)
• Relevance of keyword to its ad group
• Landing page quality and relevance
• Applicability of your ad copy
• Historical Google Ads account performance

Google will provide you the grade, along with ways to improve it. This matters because optimizing it often leads to lower costs per conversion. The best practice here is to tailor your ad text and landing page to those specific keywords.

Publish Landing Pages Built to Convert

As noted above, your landing page impacts your Quality Score, which can help or hurt your ad. Additionally, having relevant, engaging landing pages meets customer expectations. In other words, if a user clicks on a PPC ad expecting to learn about kitchen renovations, but the click leads to a generic home page, they’ll be confused. And confusion does not typically equate to a conversion.

Thus, you want to deploy custom landing pages for all your PPC ads that focus specifically on what the ad says. The pages should be conversion-centered as well to improve your chances of further user engagement.

Use Extensions When They Make Sense

Google Ads provide a variety of extensions for ads. Using these appropriately can be useful for customers. Some examples are:

• Sitelink extensions that identify specific pages
• Callouts (additional text for more details)
• Structured snippets (highlights of particular aspects of the product or service)
• Call extensions (clickable numbers)
• Location extensions (good for multi-location businesses, so customers contact the closest one)

There are advantages to using these extensions, as they could increase CTRs. They allow users to take action directly from the ad — for example, clicking on the phone number to call your business. Leveraging them can also decrease PPC campaign costs.

Are You Following PPC Campaign Best Practices?

PPC is a complex world. It’s also a long-term marketing strategy — one to continue to enhance and optimize. This can be overwhelming for many small businesses. That’s why so many trust us to manage their PPC accounts. Contact us today to see what we offer.